Following my statement at the Doha climate conference last December that there had been no global warming for 16 years, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.

The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).

Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.

The Australian reports: Dr Pachauri … said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change.

“In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution, the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be off-limits for public discussion.

“In Melbourne for a 24-hour visit to deliver a lecture for Deakin University, Dr Pachauri said that people had the right to question the science, whatever their motivations.

“‘People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,’ Dr Pachauri said.

“He said there was ‘no doubt about it’ that it was good for controversial issues to be ‘thrashed out in the public arena’.

“Dr Pachauri’s views contrast with arguments in Australia that views outside the orthodox position of approved climate scientists should be left unreported.

“Unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgment by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.”

Given that the IPCC spends a great deal more thought on getting the propaganda spin right than on doing climate science, one should be healthily suspicious of what Engineer Pachauri is up to.

Inferentially, the bureaucrats have decided they can no longer pretend I was wrong to say there has been no global warming for 16 years. This one cannot be squeezed back into the bottle. So they have decided to focus on n years without warming so that, as soon as an uptick in temperature brings the period without warming to an end, they can neatly overlook the fact that what really matters is the growing, and now acutely embarrassing, discrepancy between predicted and observed long-term warming rates.

At some point – probably quite soon – an el Niño will come along, and global temperature will rise again. Therefore, it would be prudent for us to concentrate not only on the absence of warming for n years, but also on the growing discrepancy between the longer-run warming rate predicted by the IPCC and the rate that has actually occurred over the past 60 years or so.

Since 1950 the world has warmed at a rate equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century. Yet the IPCC’s central projection is for almost three times that rate over the present century. We should keep the focus on this fundamental and enduring discrepancy, which will outlast a temporary interruption of the long period without global warming that the mainstream media once went to such lengths to conceal.

What this means is that the UN’s attempt to ban me from future annual climate gabfests for telling delegates at Doha that there had been no global warming for 16 years will fail, because soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from.

Absolutely, spot-on: the CAGW is rooted in a large, amplified warming from CO2 that is distinguishable from “natural” warming factors by its extreme effects, and of concern because of those exteme effects. There is no CO2-distinguished effect without the extreme temperature rise, and no looming catastrophe without the same rise.

If IPCC theory is shown to lead to the “C” Scenario, CO2-theory = Nature theory, reasonable CO2-mitigation has no discernible effect (other than CO2 atmospheric SUPPRESSION practices), and a 3C rise in 300 years is uneventful because of accommodation work and probably wouldn’t happen due to enhanced natural CO2 sequestration by plant life.

My interpretation of these events is a little different from that of Lord Monckton. The IPCC et al are not completely stupid and they’re going to let go of the “CO2 causes catastrophic warming” scare. They realize they’re losing that game and so they will change the rules. They’ve been sowing the seeds for a while — as “global warming” morphed into “climate change”. Extreme weather is playing very well for them at present despite the fact the whole damn story is completely sans data.

Do not think for one second that Pachauri is softening his resolve to pursue the same old path.

WE keep saying this nightmare will end soon, or words to that effect. But it doesn’t. Let us be honest aout this. Despite having nasty little things like REAL DATA set them back, the governments of the world want, need, LOVE, CAGW because they can raise money without taxing individuals. Let’s face it – that is what this entire debacle is all about. Your governments don’t care the least about saving the planet, or being green, or climate this that and the other. They care about raising government revenues – they care about — wll, Mel Brookes said it best in 1973: “Gentlemen, we’ve got to prtect our phoney-balony jobs!”

Governments repond to lobbying pressure – especially lobbies which promise big fat tax rewards which do NOT include individual (voter) tax increases. This entire fg*#@#&! is about nothing more than that. The greenie groups BELIEVE in the fairy story. Thepoliticians don’t even want to know the details and they especially don’t want to know about ANY details which will endanger their efforts to raise money for even more government programs.

We are not making headway because things have not gotten colder. They have remained constant. Until it gets colder, we are in for an uphill battle. As Pogo said, “From here on down it’s uphill all the way.” Steady temperature obviously gets us no-where, so we are flogging an almost dead horse. But it is what we have until things cool off. We must all recognize this truth. We have forced them to recognize that the Earth is not getting hotter, so they focus on so-called super-storms. The endless spiral of cat and mouse will continue unless the Earth cools off.

This is not doom and gloom surrender. Let’s keep plugging away because we are at least keeping the hell hounds at bay. Without our efforts, big and small, our governemtns would already have us bent over and hugging our own knees. But I think we need to recognize that this entire mess is no no way about climate – it’s about big government and $$$$$$$$$

Makes ZERO difference what this lying Pachauri SOB says; the AGW thesis is a POLITICAL MOVEMENT as is communism, socialism, etc.
We can experience over the next 10 years “average global temperatures” (this assumes an average global temperature has any significance whatsoever) well below normal and the AGW “scientists” will STILL claim it is due to human activity.
70 years of communist rule in Russia resulted in mass impoverishment of their citizenry and mass exterminations of about 20 to 50 million people (vs. Hitler’s murder of 10 million). Yet today, there are many folks here in the USA and W.Europe (e.g., OWS) that believe communism is the way to go.
My point is that facts, data, evidence, mean absolutely nothing to the leftist radical. Their belief system is religious in every sense of the word; and so it is with the AGW radicals.
The AGW thesis will never, ever go away even if much of the N. Hemisphere once again gets buried under 10,000 feet of ice.

Aussies are really great people. Don’t judge them by the thin layer of scum that has risen to the top of the media and climate science ponds. Fortunately the internet is where most people get their news these days and the truth must prevail.

M’lord, I’m having a hard time accepting that an El Niño event is a global warming event. It is simply the release of energy already here from one place to another and actually allows energy in the oceans to return to the universe. Once heat has reached the atmosphere it doesn’t linger long in the Earth system.

However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.

None of the models I have looked at (granted superficially) does properly evaluate natural variability, the apparent lack of sufficient change in the TSI is continuously and falsely presented as ‘the sun has nothing to do with it’.
As the solar activity winds-down global temperature will respond, since there is strong evidence of a variable solar input beyond and above the TSI, as demonstrated here:http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm

Can’t someone email Pachauri’s press releases to the Obama admin, congress and senate? Along with it should go the “no more snow” in the NH and no more rain in Australia. A very tiny bit of logic reveals that if, with their models they have got the last 17 years wrong, it means that they didn’t know what they were talking about in the 1990s, so how can they be allowed to jigger things around to say now that they expected things to freeze up. We need a new book with the contradicting science from individuals in juxtaposition. I can’t believe the papers, TV, Hollywood, all the universities, all the government and quasi gov research agencies can get away with this gross about turn. I’m pleased to see Pachauri, Hadley Centre, some of the hockey team emeriti, the NYT, some of NOAA and even the BBC are beginning their revision and bet hedging. But why hasn’t it collapsed entirely? Oh I don’t expect the A list of the consensus to let go – ever, but what about at least one university, or journal, or agency.

The “fundamental and enduring discrepancy” on which to fix one’s eyes is that climate models can not and do not predict climate. As soon as one takes your tack, CMoB, of announcing a discrepancy between models and observations, one has yielded the argument into the AGW arena where model projections are holy referential writ.

They are no such thing.

Climate models are tuned to 20th century observables. They are adjusted so that their large errors are anti-correlated and off-setting. Their error is disappeared. They don’t predict a bloody thing. There can be no discrepancy.

The entire AGW conversation battens on the fact that the climate has warmed by quasi-oscillatory happenstance. Climate models are made to make happenstance look like CO2-driven causality.

This is what should be kept fundamentally and enduringly in view. This is the ground that should not be yielded. Climate models are a tendentious construction. They are a predictive crock.

“What this means is that the UN’s attempt to ban me from future annual climate gabfests for telling delegates at Doha that there had been no global warming for 16 years will fail, because soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from.”

Christopher, you underestimate your own abilities; I am sure they will find other events to ban you from!

Concur. There just isn’t a lot of warm water in the Western Pacific Warm pool. The trades have been around “nominal”, neither very strong or weak. As a result we are not seeing a massive charging of that warm pool. It is the relaxation of the trade winds that allows that charged pool of warm water to rebound back eastward along the equator and create El Nino conditions. That pool isn’t particularly “charged” at the moment. If we were to see an El Nino condition, it would be a rather weak one.

A sister issue is “where do the lukewarmers now stand in the face of this embarrassing development? If you were lukewarm 20 years ago, you were essentially considered on the sceptical side of the arguments. You were holding back from jumping into the cauldron holus bolus, thereby harming your chances at funding. You must have had a reason for this. If the foamin-at-the mouth warmers have been trimming their expectations back – even Hansen is saying, gee we included a lower sensitivity in our thinking. You guys in the middle are, perforce, becoming more wrong than the gradual revisionists who are crowding into your territory. You have provided a soft landing spot. I admire rgbatduke’s position – he doesn’t know – maybe it will finally warm up or maybe it will get colder. I say you don;t know either. What do you say.

What a truly marvelous statement. A “pause in global warming”, not a “lack of global warming despite what we predicted”, not a “monkey wrench in the predictions of models regarding global warming”, not a “total disproving of the hypothesis of global warming”, not a “we haven’t got the faintest idea why global warming hasn’t occurred as we predicted it should”; just a “pause”.

I think Pachauri means 30 years includes the 15 years already with no warming so he’s planning to retire in about ten years and become a skeptic and “say see I told you so” to his AGW pals such as Mann etc. LOL

What a truly marvelous statement. A “pause in global warming”, not a “lack of global warming despite what we predicted” ….

lolz

This.

(Now, yes, it actually would be possible to have a general warming trend with a 17 year averaged flat spot, of course. But their certainty that their numerous models MUST BE RIGHT despite the lack of evidence that they are right … is as laughable as it’s scientific folly.)

Maybe I’m wrong, but weren’t the effects of global warming only going to be apparent from the early 1980’s, the warming before this was supposed to be natural. That gives us 17 years of warming (1980-1997) that is attributable to global warming. Now if the railroad engineer thinks that 30 yrs of no warming is needed to prove that there is no global warming, shouldn’t this also apply to the warming, ie 17 yrs of warming followed by 17 yrs of cooling is hardly proof of AGW.

Pachauri and the IPCC can’t have it both ways. According to the criteria he set out in his statement of ‘(no) warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least”‘, he’s disqualified the warming as irrelevant.

17, 18, 23 years with no warming. Then I, a simple laymen, would like to ask Mr Pachauri if there ever was such a thing as Global Warming? I mean in all seriousness when (in what time frame specifically) was it supposed to be occurring? Did it ever really exist outside of the natural Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the end of the Little Ice Age, the ever expanding urban areas that engulfed SSTs, or through deceptive efforts of suspect scientists via egregious data manipulation?

Dr. Pachauri earned his bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, his masters degree in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State, and a dual doctorate in Industrial Engineering and Economics from the same American university. Personally, I have nothing but disdain for Dr. Pachauri and his minions. But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics. One hopes we can do better than adopt the ad hominem tactics so common with the CAGW crowd.

The bad science of CO2 induced global warming, i.e. climate disruption, is now so totally engrained within the political, environmental, bureaucratic, institutional and scientific organizational power centers from the United Nations to the AMS to the Democrat Pary to local governments and school boards, it will take a lot more than 17 years of no warming to stop it. It is as powerful as a Tsunami and continues to sweep the world with wave after wave of destructive power. The price we pay for everything from gasoline and food to electric power to keep our 21st century advanced way of life going from our cars to our smart phones and tablets is under act. I deeply appreciate Lord Monckton and all of the army of skeptics continuing efforts to stop it. But, a tsumnai cannot be stopped by mere people. I await some natural force that can stop this craziness.

It is said, but it’s wrong. Prince Charles is unlikely to be a secret Red. Soros has an agenda alright, but it’s unlikely to be to remove personal wealth. David Cameron is hardly likely to be a mole for the FSB.

There are loads of right wing, conservative Greens in the world. (NB: to Americans, the US is not the world. Don’t confuse your politics with ours.)

Though, he schemes new angles and of this there can be no doubt but it is a considerable recantation for the high priest himself to admit: ‘warming is stopped’.
What is really needed, for the whole AGW scam to be put to bed is for someone – to halt the involuntary US taxpayer funding the IPCC and its egregious navel gazing gabfest, coupled with the year round carousel summit farce………….
You know how it goes; “Mmmmm super!”
“Another IPCC summit – which 5 star hotels and which capital city – are we staying in this week dahlin?”
Alas, with the Chicago fraudster newly re-installed in the Oval office, there would seem to be little chance of the UN Mafia and the IPCC shutting down its operation – too many jobs, too much loss of face and a global warming industry is at stake.

“Is there some theory that I don’t know about, or is he just making up numbers after the fact?”

The global warming – climate change – climate disruption -extreme weather caused by global warming movement is a green-red relativist-revisionist movement.
The Ministry of Truth (The MSM owned by industry and politicians in an ever closer incestuous relationship) controls the news, entertainment, education, and the arts.

They will “rectify” the historical records to concord with the movement’s current pronouncements, thus everything it says is true. The global warming – climate change – climate disruption -extreme weather caused by global warming is just one of the many historical topics being rewritten (‘rectified’) to fit the new age post-modern worldview.
1984 is no longer fiction.

17, 18, 23 years with no warming. Then I, a simple laymen, would like to ask Mr Pachauri if there ever was such a thing as Global Warming? I mean in all seriousness when (in what time frame specifically) was it supposed to be occurring?

Dude, I’m still waiting for my promised ice age. Where the heck is my ice age?

Pachauri. Annan, Trenberth, even Hanson are all now doing the “rats from the sinking ship thingy” and looking to bail on all their previous hysterical fear mongering.

Perfect timing for the world’s greatest economic genius, King Barack “BamBam” Obama to finally succumb to the Great Greene Glowball Warming Scam & Scheme and believe he has to save the planet from something that isn’t happening.

It’s time the MSM started listening to people like our host and Lord Monckton. It hasn’t warmed since 2010. An ice age is just around the corner. Even the Arctic ice has re-formed since the low last year.

Now that the internet has provided us with a way of comparing notes with each other across the inhabited parts of the globe, I would be interested to know what people from other parts of the world have to say about my observations of the weather in England. Around the turn of the century, the summers were very hot and the winters were so mild that I had to mow my lawn during January and February. On a trip to Scotland I was actually surprised to see snow. At that time I hadn’t seen snow for several years.

Since then there has been about a decade of cold and wet summers and colder than average winters with quite a lot of snow. My point is that, here at least, the temperature has not flatlined, but has gone down, quite significantly. If the average temperatures have been level over this period, some places must have become hotter to compensate. Over to you, the rest of the world.

Dr. Pachauri earned his bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, his masters degree in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State, and a dual doctorate in Industrial Engineering and Economics from the same American university. Personally, I have nothing but disdain for Dr. Pachauri and his minions. But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics. One hopes we can do better than adopt the ad hominem tactics so common with the CAGW crowd.

*

How the heck is this misleading or an embarrassment for honest skeptics? How the heck is this an ad hominem tactic?

Although I have no respect for Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, I disagree with trying to belittle him by repeated use of “the railroad engineer” for the reason that “railroad engineer” has two, very different connotations. In North America, a “railroad engineer” is the person who actually drives the locomotive. In the UK, Australia, and probably some other places, such a person is an “engine driver”. Pachauri studied railroad engineering, the planning of the actual tracks, trestles, etc., quite a different person from an engine driver.
But I’ll be the first to say that railroad engineering is no particular background to head an organization related to climate…..

Jack Maloney says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:56 pm
“Personally, I have nothing but disdain for Dr. Pachauri and his minions. But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics. One hopes we can do better than adopt the ad hominem tactics so common with the CAGW crowd.”

I completely agree – an appropriate description would have been failed railroad engineer – as he quit the difficult task of designing working railroads to commence on a career path for international snake oil peddler.

Stonyground says:
February 22, 2013 at 1:15 pm
“Since then there has been about a decade of cold and wet summers and colder than average winters with quite a lot of snow. My point is that, here at least, the temperature has not flatlined, but has gone down, quite significantly. If the average temperatures have been level over this period, some places must have become hotter to compensate. Over to you, the rest of the world.”

Same in germany. Our winters are more like Scottish winters than English. Very little snow in 80ies and 90ies, Techno generation showing bare bellies throughout the 90ies all year round. Now: Frozen stiff every winter. Girls huddle up in trenchcoats and leather boots. (likes that)

Ian L McQueen and Jack Maloney. I beg to respectfully differ. If people can criticise us skeptics for not having qualifications then they have no right not to expect us to criticise alarmists for having qualifications.

John – you are spot on. What is particularly resent about the CAGW establishment is that they are now resorting to making every single weather event an opportunity to “blame global warming”. Never mind that storms, droughts, floods, and fires have happened in the past, with the same frequency and severity as today (e.g. Katrina versus Camille).

I used to really enjoy learning about and observing the weather – but now, it seems, the weather has been politicized and perverted for the sake of people with non-weather-related agendas. And I’m fearful whenever I hear some forecaster or weather “expert” on TV talking about some particular event that the next words out of their mouths will be “…and this is because our planet is getting warmer…”. Ugh.

By the way, what do you think about The Weather Channel naming storms? I think it is the most juvenile and pathetic thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Love the way the goalposts mysteriously move when the data do not match the model. The hockey stick theory was based on one anomaly year and comes out whenever there is a single very hot day or a king tide. Although debunked, the hockey stick “sky is falling” is what fuels all the scaremongering and idiotic legislation dictated by the UN. But who dictates to the UN? Who puts up the green inspired resolutions to hoodwink world leaders(and the ones the UN have sanctioned) to vote for? As some of us know, the Fabian Society were the chief instigators for the formation of the League of Nations and the UN. They have welcomed the infiltration of ultra green loonies in to the UN since the Fabians have ultra green intent. No mincing words-they are at least as dangerous as the Nazis, but on a worldwide scale and without a bullet fired.

“Personally, I have nothing but disdain for Dr. Pachauri and his minions. But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics. One hopes we can do better than adopt the ad hominem tactics so common with the CAGW crowd.”

It must be terrible being Pachauri right now. After talking of rubbing asbestos onto sceptics faces and accusing a respected Indian glaciologist of involved in voodoo science, he now has to suffer the indignity of 17 years of lack of warming. Rest assured, the guys in the know would have explained to him what it actually means as per the models failing. His greatest fear is if the sceptics were right afterall then he might have to give his undeserved Nobel prize back.

Pachauri
“we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.”

——-

Pachauri
“IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.”

“But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics.”

I fail to see how calling him a railroad engineer is cheap or misleading. He IS a railroad engineer. I daresay he is rather proud of that accomplishment. I suspect that when this whole IPCC boondoggle comes crashing down he’ll hope people remember him as “Pachauri the Railroad Engineer” rather than “Pachauri the Global Warming Charlatan”.

REPLY: My grandfather was a railroad engineer, he designed steam locomotives and I still have a scale sizedone he made for me when I was a tyke. He could do miracles with steam, with climate, not so much – Anthony

dp says: “M’lord, I’m having a hard time accepting that an El Niño event is a global warming event. It is simply the release of energy already here from one place to another and actually allows energy in the oceans to return to the universe. Once heat has reached the atmosphere it doesn’t linger long in the Earth system.”

dp, you’re overlooking that an El Nino also redistributes warm water within the oceans. ENSO portrays itself in the instrument temperature record as a naturally fueled recharge-discharge oscillator. For example, let’s look at the recharge and discharge associated with the 1995/96 La Niña and the 1997/98 El Niño.
1, La Niñas act as the recharge mode for tropical Pacific ocean heat content (the source of fuel for El Niños).
The period highlighted in red in the above link captures the impact of the 1995/96 La Niña, which provided the fuel for the 1997/98 El Niño, and shifted up tropical Pacific ocean heat content.

2. El Niños act as the discharge mode. The 1997/98 El Niño released a monstrously large volume of naturally created warm water (see above graph) from below the surface of the west Pacific Warm Pool. That warm water sloshed briefly into the East Pacific (90S-90N, 180-80W), where it temporarily raised sea surface temperatures more than 0.5 deg C.
(Note that the East Pacific hasn’t warmed in 31 years.) It then sloshed back to the West Pacific, Indian and West Pacific Oceans (90S-90N, 80W-180), and raised sea surface temperatures there 0.19 deg C.

And the sea surface temperatures remained at that level until the 2009/10 El Niño, which bumped sea surface temperatures up a little more.

Gary Pearse says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:09 pm
“If the foamin-at-the mouth warmers have been trimming their expectations back – even Hansen is saying, gee we included a lower sensitivity in our thinking. You guys in the middle are, perforce, becoming more wrong than the gradual revisionists who are crowding into your territory. You have provided a soft landing spot. ”

I’m not a lukewarmer but I have to defend them here – even if there would never have been a lukewarmer position the warmist internationalists of UNIPCC and UNFCCC would never have had any problems scaling back their propaganda or even reversing it to an alarmist cooling stance. The controlled media makes it possible; especially of course the public media, ABC, BBC, CBC, German ARD and ZDF, PBS.

We had the Waldsterben (Forest dying) hysteria in the late 80ies in Germany; nothing of it materialized and nobody was held accountable. Media love everyone who delivers them a scare story and will never take revenge.

Case in point, in the 70ies Stephen Schneider was an alarmist warner of the coming Ice Age (caused by CO2) and then switched to warn of impending doom through warming (caused by CO2). There is NO, absolutely NO media coverage that questions his change of mind.

Not only does it not elevate the debate in; in fact, make us look smaller by engaging in ad hominem ridicule, but in this case it undermines the importance and reach of this post.

“IPCC chairman acknowledges ‘No warming for 17 years’ is a big deal”

Railroad engineer, not so much.
REPLY: headline stays, be as upset as you wish. Happy to take it down though if he apologizes for “voodoo science” comments related to 2035 Himalyagate skeptics who were right. The headline is factual, he is a railroad engineer, and the headline usage was Monckton’s. – Anthony

3) And last but not least- over the last 30 years (Humluma, Stordahlc & Solheimd (2013) The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. Global and Planetary Change: 100, 51–69)

A sister issue is “where do the lukewarmers now stand in the face of this embarrassing development?

The ‘lukewarmer’ position is looking stronger than ever. Lukewarmers typically expect average warming of between 0.1 deg and 0.15 deg per decade. This, remember, is an average. so ‘we’ fully expect some decades to show less warming than others. The most recent decade has seen a significant fall-off in solar activity including a transition from solar max to solar min. Since we know the temperature change due to reduced TSI from max to min is roughly -0.1 deg C then it’s clear the temperature record is tying in with lukewarm projections very nicely.

I’d be more worried if I was a strong advocate for solar forcing. The much heralded global cooling has yet to materialise despite the significant decline (now at pre-1900 levels) in solar activitiy.

I fail to see how calling him a railroad engineer is cheap or misleading. He IS a railroad engineer.

It’s like calling President Obama a lawyer. It’s a belittling distraction considering his current status.

There is clearly nothing wrong with being a railroad engineer, but to highlight it in such an important headline is an error. Simple courtesy is to refer to a person by their title and position. From there, one can always editorially add a clause somewhere in the article such as, “Pachauri, who was trained as a railroad engineer, …..”

If Ronald Reagan was announcing negotiations with the Russians, a headline beginning, “Once Popular B-Movie Actor Ronald Reagan.Announces …” would hardly be an appropriate way to headline an article about an important development. It would make the news reporting agency look biased, smaller.

Christopher Monckton wrote: “However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.”

Pachauri’s admission filled me with hope for a few hours…at least. However I am British. Unfortunately I have just looked at the BBC website…nothig mentioned (which is what I had expected).
However a quick glance at the Science page and there it was….a story about a massive thaw in Permafrost in the Arctic with the consequence of a a massive release of Methane and Carbon Dioxide.
All you non Brits have no idea what we have to put up with. Almost the entire scientific community, politicians and journalists are AGW crooks.
Two weeks ago week London Mayor Boris Johnson dared to suggest that sun cycles were the underlying reasons for climate change…he was heavily criticised and ridiculed.

Given that the IPCC spends a great deal more thought on getting the propaganda spin right than on doing climate science, one should be healthily suspicious of what Engineer Pachauri is up to.

– – – – – – – – – –

Christopher Monckton,

I think the IPCC is a science warping influence by intention and should be abandoned for the sake of re-establishing a very well balanced, transparent and open science community in the area of climate study.

What is Pachauri trying to accomplish by his statements in the The Australian?

Pachauri is doing a common simple face saving maneuver. The simplicity is genius.

It is a maneuver that will allow Pachauri (and the IPCC directorate) in the future to simply look back on what he is reported to have said in the The Australian article and then he can say honestly something like ‘The IPCC was assessing the new skeptical science research on climate once it was suitably established, which is our job’.

With that established then the IPCC can truthfully say it is current with changing scientific evidence/research. Meanwhile, with that temporary recovery of its credibility, the IPCC will be able to credibly shift to some brand new alarming world threatening claim; a new alarming claim that will become its new job to perform scientific assessments in support of it.

If one looks at what the Dr said literally without bias – I actually think he is quite correct. It may well take 30 years to rule out global warming as a long term trend.
Note he talks about an upward trend without talking about CO2, and indeed there has been an upward trend since 1850. Where one might take issue with him is – It is only 0.06 degrees per decade, not the IPCC’s 0.2 degrees per decade. And clearly, the link with rising CO2 is broken. The current pause is the result of a cyclic down trend, part of a 60 year oscillation, which was predicted (by others, Search WUWT for Orssengoor Akasufo) and which has an amplitude large enough to drown out the upward trend. The current pause is arguably the result of the flattening and “rolling over” of that 60 year cycle. Im guessing it will be another half cycle before we will see the up-swing of that 60 year cycle, and the global warming alarmism will begin again. Trying to see if the long term 0.06 degree warming trend is there during this cooling half of the cycle is difficult. It is probably still there.
The current trend of assuming that we are heading into an Ice Age just because the short term (60 year) cycle has turned down is just a little alarming. Can I remind everyone of the 60 year cycle of climate alarmism explicit in the old media reports. Ice Age Warming Ice Age Warming – An Ice Age scare is actually overdue.
My point is that we may be heading into an Ice Age but it may well be years before there is any REAL evidence outside of the already established swings. In the meantime the past evidence established over 130 years points to a 0.06 degree rise per decade.

But even citing this article as a fortuitous find when debating elsewhere, I was moved to point out on that site I didn’t like this headline. Other people here, fans of the WattsUpWithThat, who probably weren’t influenced by me at all (since I posted my relevant comment elsewhere) also disliked the headline. So I’m offering feedback, which dovetails with their feedback.

I think pointing out Pachauri’s lack of pertinent qualifications is fair game and maybe even makes sense in some headlines (like if the post itself was designed to mock a statement he made as ill-informed), but when he’s acknowledging truth, I don’t see how it’s helpful. Seems that “IPCC Head Says No Global Warming for Past 17 Years” is a better headline, but naturally you’ll choose your own.

“At some point – probably quite soon – an el Niño will come along, and global temperature will rise again”.
What is missing is the warming trend which was apparent last century. A couple of years of warmer temperatures wouldn’t cut it. Nor would a La Nina cooler period. With every year that goes by, it becomes ever harder for any one-off event to change a 17+-year trend from neutral to positive.

james griffin says:
February 22, 2013 at 2:23 pm
“All you non Brits have no idea what we have to put up with. Almost the entire scientific community, politicians and journalists are AGW crooks.”

I’m German, I can relate. We have not one BBC but two (ARD and ZDF) and we fund them with 6 bn EUR a year. I tried to find comparisons of how much per capita countries fund their public boradcasting tyrants but nothing’s on the web. But from the numbers I gathered Germany is simply off the scale propaganda-wise.

pachauri’s admission is not the headline showing up on google australia news page. rather it is this headline from taxpayer-funded ABC which says nothing about the Met Office revelations:

21 Feb: ABC World Today: Head of IPCC says most vulnerable countries have already reached ‘tipping point’
SIMON LAUDER: You’ve said before that carbon dioxide needs to be no higher than 350 parts per million to avoid the climate tipping point. Do you think action is happening fast enough to avoid that still?
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: Well, I did preface that remark by saying this is a personal view and I’m not saying that as chairman of the IPCC because the IPCC is not supposed to be politically prescriptive. I mean it is for the world to decide whether they want 350 parts per million or 450 or whatever but as a human being, as an individual I would say that I would feel comfortable with that level and of course, we know that is going to be quite a challenge…
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: You know, it’s really a question of defining what the tipping point is for whom. Parts of the world where if you were to drop people over there, they would tell you that they are probably at the tipping point already or they might even have crossed it…
(re IPCC Fifth Assessment):
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: Well, I expect it will be an advancement in terms of knowledge based on published material that has been produced since 2007, since we brought out the last report. There will be a few new features. We’re looking at a whole range of topics in much greater depth this time and hopefully we’ll be able to fill some of the gaps.
Most importantly there’ll be, in my view, much greater regional detail this time so people would know what the impacts of climate change would be in specific locations throughout the world and I think this would help create understanding on what needs to be done…http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3695289.htm

It’s not just in the UK, it’s happening in Australia too. They keep trying to blame the increase in floods and fires this decade on climate change, as well as the heat wave we had earlier this year, and the drought. They don’t mention climate change when it snows. Or when Sydney had the coldest day in twenty years. It’s all just an excuse for the carbon tax. Everyone’s in on it. Even the liberal/conservative party won’t come right out and say it’s a hoax, which it is. It’s the media’s fault.

John Finn says:
“The ‘lukewarmer’ position is looking stronger than ever.”

You are dreaming, John. Every warmist prediction has turned out to be flat wrong. And CO2 is completely harmless at current and projected concentrations.

Do you actually know what ‘lukewarmer‘ means? Your post suggests not. Most ‘lukewarmers’ think warming due to increased CO2 is likely to be modest and probably harmless. However, they do not deny basic physics which says that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations will cause the earth to be warmer than it would otherwise be.

Admitting that there has been no warming in 17 years is NOT saying that the models are wrong. So as long as the IPCC maintains the climate sensitivity line of 3 degrees means nothing has changed, except that it is apparantly now OK to have very long pauses in the warming without having to question the elephant in the room.

“But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics.”

– – – – – – – – –

Jack Maloney & Christoph Dollis,

Journalistic license is as journalists do. Their style is designed for an intended audience. Style of any give journalist in any give article of course will please only some. Clearly, Christopher Monckton’s style, when he is taking the role of a journalist, does strongly appeal to some and strongly annoys others while probably few are neutral wrt his style. : )

The appreciation of a journalist’s style aside, it is the content that is valid or not. Is Christopher Monckton’s content in this WUWT post deserving of merit or not? My assessment is that Monckton’s observations are valid and he deserves merit for his post. Well done Christopher.

Personally, no man can command my respect merely by his position . . . . and Pachauri does not. By the way, are we being railroaded by Pachauri via the article in The Australian? Avast, me thinks a pirate is afoot me matey. Arrr. : )

For those who seem to disdain the “railroad engineer” tag, I personally read two things into it.
1. He may have two PhDs a Masters and a Bachelors, but none of them are directly applicable to the “science” of global warming. I have a degree in Geology, a Masters in Environmental Technology and a PhD in Environmental Engineering looking specifically at Urban Air pollution. The latter two are from a world top ten university. However (perhaps because of this), I freely recognise that such qualifications are not sufficient to qualify me to follow a professional role in Gloal Climatology.
2. And more to the point, Nevertheless, the IPCC needs a railroad engineer to ensure that certain political views are railroaded through the process.

Just a small niggle. The chart makes it look as if the warmest year was 2006 but I’m sure that’s not right. Does it need a correction?

(I showed it to the wife. We agree over most things but she sides with the alarmist scientists, probably because of the kids. I try to point out that it’s all just brainwashing but so far she and I agree to disagree to keep the peace. Glad for this place for moral support and good information to combat the rubbish the scientists keep putting out.)

You are dreaming, John. Every warmist prediction has turned out to be flat wrong. And CO2 is completely harmless at current and projected concentrations.

Do you actually know what ‘lukewarmer‘ means? Your post suggests not. Most ‘lukewarmers’ think warming due to increased CO2 is likely to be modest and probably harmless. However, they do not deny basic physics which says that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations will cause the earth to be warmer than it would otherwise be.

– – – – – – – – – – –

John Finn,

Thank you for a working definition of the ‘lukewarmer’ position from a lukewarmer.

Epistemologically, would you say the position is a conceptual integration of reasonably verified observations into a theory to explain them or is it a prediction of a thesis yet to be verified by observation? Or is that question falsely dichotomous and there is a third description epistemologically that applies to what the ‘lukewarmer’ position is?

I have been critical of the basis of the lukewarmer position in the past because to me it looks derivative from the alarming position and not a position indistinguishable in itself.

I note that John Finn has still not produced his specific definition of the line-in-the-sand, where AGW is falsified.

I am totally willing to accept testable, empirical evidence of AGW. The problem is thatno such measurable evidence exists. As a scientific skeptic, I cannot accept a baseless conjecture, which has no verifiable, measurable supporting evidence. We need evidence. Who is to say that the AGW conjecture is not just a giant, grant-fed head fake? Without any quantifiable, verifiable scientific evidence — and with the $Billions at stake — students of human nature should ask themselves that question. Where are the measurements? Where is the testable, falsifiable scientific evidence?

AGW may well exist. But if it does, it is so minuscule that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes. And as such, why should taxpayers pay another dollar to promote such an evidence-free scare?

The key to the Skeptic position is that climate systems are too complex to be modeled; we cannot base trillion-dollar policies on so vague a science. However, several self-proclaimed skeptics are not afraid to predict constant or cooler global temperatures. This implies an irrational belief in certain types of climate models.

The Australian already has a new article re Pachauri’s admission. it’s behind a paywall, and has “ethics” prof Clive Hamilton attacking CAGW “denial”:

23 Feb: Australian: Graham Lloyd: Science to ‘win’ on climate
A PAUSE in global temperature rises, confirmed by the British Met Office and NASA climate scientist James Hanson, was temporary and science would win out over climate change denial, public ethics professor Clive Hamilton said yesterday.
Professor Hamilton’s comments follow acknowledgement by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri of the British Met Office’s downward revision of its forecast global temperature average to 2017…http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/science-to-win-on-climate/story-fn59niix-1226583866039

During cooling phases in global climate ,the presence of El Nino’s may raise global temperature temporairly, but if the overall trend of the ocean SST is cooling , the global temperature anomalies could continue to drop like they did in the period 1880-1910 when 4-5 El Nino’s could not warm the climate trend from cooling to warming .

Tom G(ologist), this is NOT about raising taxes or grabbing money. This is about setting the world up for massive population reduction “by natural causes.” This nightmare will not go away because it is nothing but a sham – “keep your eyes on my right hand, don’t notice what my left hand is doing.” By pushing for “green” energy, they are taking away the ability of a population to survive the potentiality of an onsetting ice age. Cut down on the food supply – biomass production – and move to unstable energy sources to supply “heat” in the worsening winters, will happily cause the deaths of millions, probably billions of people. Population reduction is the driving force, not money. Most of the wealth is already concentrated into a very small number of families, so forget about the money grab, that’s all part of the “watch my right hand” in this playing out scenario. It’s the left hand, regulations driving the energy production capabilities down to the minimum and sustained by sources that will fail, that we really need to consider. This isn’t anything other that an “in your face” population reduction scheme, and the sooner people start to realize it, the better are their chances of breaking it before it kills them off.

A PAUSE in global temperature rises, confirmed by the British Met Office and NASA climate scientist James Hanson, was temporary and science would win out over climate change denial, public ethics professor Clive Hamilton said yesterday.

Professor Hamilton’s comments follow acknowledgement by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri of the British Met Office’s downward revision of its forecast global temperature average to 2017. The downward revision has been widely reported internationally as meaning the global average temperature would have remained steady, at a record high level, for two decades.

Dr Hansen, from the NASA Institute for Space Studies, has also acknowledged the pause in global temperature rises over the past decade.

In a paper published last month he said the five-year mean global temperature had been flat for a decade, “which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing”.

There has been little reporting of the Met Office or Hansen statements in Australia.

Professor Hamilton said: “Of course I accept the Met Office’s analysis, but I reject the spin put on it by some news organisations, including The Australian, that it is some kind of admission that global warming is not as serious as previously believed. The Met Office itself has attempted to correct that distortion.

“The factors responsible for the levelling out of warming, albeit at record highs, are expected to pass in a few years. Then we are in real trouble.”

In an interview with The Australian, Dr Pachauri said a warming pause would have to last 30 to 40 years “at least” to break the long-term warming trend. He said it was important people were able to openly discuss all issues surrounding the challenge of climate change.

Professor Hamilton said: “Of course everyone has the right to question the science of climate change, in the same way that everyone has the right to deny that smoking causes lung cancer.

“And in the same way that The Australian has the right to its continuing campaign to discredit climate science. But that does not make distortion of the facts any less irresponsible.

“For all of the hindrance to action caused by the campaign of climate science denial, in the end the science will win out.”

The Met Office said over the past 140 years global surface temperatures had risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there had been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures had risen very slowly or cooled, it said.

“The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15-year-long periods are not unusual,” it said.

Dr Pachauri said the Met Office was “looking at longer time frames and there the picture is quite unmistakable”.

“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deviating from the trend, you are still around the trend,” Dr Pachauri said.

D.B. Stealey says:
February 22, 2013 at 3:49 pm
John Finn,
You seem to think I make a distinction between lukewarmers and climate alarmists.
I don’t. They both promote the AGW scare without producing any testable, empirical evidence.

D.B Stealey, I’m not sure what point it is you’re trying to make. I assume it’s that CO2 has no effect whatsoever on earth’s climate. This, of course, cannot be the case. There are multiple lines of evidence that show that CO2 impedes the flow of LWIR energy that is emitted from the earth’s surface. I’m sure that you’re aware that the energy absorbed by the earth (and its atmosphere) must be re-radiated back to space else the earth would continue to warm indefinitely .

This is basic thermodynamics . If you have a problem understanding this then any further discussion is pointless.

CO2 (and other GHGs) absorb outgoing terrestrial IR and emit in all directions – some back towards the earth’s surface. This has the effect of ‘slowing down’ emission to space. But there is still a constant source of energy from the sun. There is, therefore, an energy imbalance where incoming solar energy is greater than outgoing LW energy and so the earth must warm….. until balance is restored. This is why the earth is warmer than it should be given its distance from the sun.

CO2 is, therefore, essential to life on earth – but what happens if we add more CO2 …..

As CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and, in particular, in the COLDER, DRIER, regions of the upper troposphere it increases the average height at which energy is emitted to space. The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us that the rate of emission will fall (i.e. E~T^4). That is, we have an energy imbalance. This means the earth’s surface and lower atmosphere will warm until equilibrium is established.

If you doubt the effect of CO2 then you need to check out graphs which depict earth’s emission spectra. These show that CO2 is clearly influential in determining the earth’s energy balance.

Tell me: in your opinion, what exactly would it take to falsify the AGW conjecture? Give me specific numbers.

Your question suggests a lack of understanding of the issues. There are factors – other than CO2 – which influence earth’s climate. However, while those factors tend to be cyclical the CO2 increase, while not permanent, will have some effect for some time yet. In a previous post I explained how solar activity could cause a temporary pause in the global temperature rise. That effect is now factored in so I don’t expect any additional solar influence, therefore ………

If global temperatures over the next decade fell – even by a small amount – I would have to accept one of three possibilities, i.e. (1) Solar activity has a greater effect than I thought. (2) CO2 has less effect or (3) Some other variable such as major volcanic activity has kicked in.

To say “there has been no warming in the last 17 years” is misleading.

The trend over the last 17 years is a slight warming. In other words, the trend is positive.

The statement in 2008 State of the Climate was ““The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

That condition has NOT been met by observations, since the trend is positive (although not statistically significantly different than zero at the 95% confidence level).

There is a difference between “no warming” and “no statistically significant warming”. I am disappointed that so many skeptics have chosen to ignore the difference.

I understand your consternation. The planet itself is falsifying your belief system. You are getting exasperated that Planet Earth is not doing what you want it to do.

The conclusion is simple: CO2 just does not have the claimed effect. Any global warming from CO2 is so minuscule that it is inconsequential. It does not matter. The entire global warming scare is based on the wrongheaded belief that “carbon” is a problem. But as we see, CO2 is not a problem. Even the head of the UN/IPCC has had to climb down from his falsified global warming predictions.

When we talk about reds, we do not mean card carrying members of the Party. We mean everyone who shares their beliefs though they would never attend a Party meeting. Also, we usually include the useful idiots. Why talk about the Party? It is ineffective in North America.

James Griffin would like to know if anywhere is like Britain for global warming correctness in the media and from politicians. Well , New Zealand seems to be. Does anyone know if EcoConnect really is a joint venture or something similar between the New Zealand and United Kingdom governments? http://www.eco-connect.org/ as I think I read recently? It makes my head swim so I can’t cite the reference. If it is true it explains a lot.

By the way, each of the above are actually a few months more. I am not sure if it is useful to give this information since the huge spike in January for both RSS and UAH changed things by one month in each set.
However if you want to know the very latest times to the nearest month that the warming is not significant for each set, they are as follows: RSS since September 1989; UAH since June 1993; Hadcrut3 since August 1993; Hadcrut4 since July 1994; GISS since June 1995 and NOAA since May 1994.

Pachauri actually talks sense. Everyone has a right to question the science. Any genuine scientist would welcome such questioning as an opportunity to communicate.

The fact that temperatures are not increasing in step with CO2 levels strongly suggests that CO2 does not cause significant temperature increase, and that the rise from the seventies to the nineties was natural variation.

There appears to be a long list of scientific and policy problems for the extreme global warming supporters. It is quite amazing how long the manipulation of data and models to push an agenda has gone on. It is quite amazing that the general public has supported the spending of billions of dollars on the green scams which were justified to “save the planet” from climate change. Hopefully reason and logic will eventually prevail.

Satellite data shows planetary cloud cover in the tropics increases or decreases to resist forcing changes (negative feedback). If the planet’s feedback response is negative a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in roughly 1C of global warming with most of the warming at high latitudes. The lack of any warming for the last 16 years supports the negative feedback research (note the planetary warming due to the increase in CO2 is logarithmic (subsequent increases in atmospheric CO2 has less and less affect on planetary temperature or equivalently the initial increase in atmospheric CO2 has the greatest effect.)

“The problem for global warming supporters is they actually need for past warming from CO2 to be higher than 0.7C. If the IPCC is correct that based on their high-feedback models we should expect to see 3C of warming per doubling of CO2, looking backwards this means we should already have seen about 1.5C of CO2-driven warming based on past CO2 increases. But no matter how uncertain our measurements, it’s clear we have seen nothing like this kind of temperature rise. Past warming has in fact been more consistent with low or even negative feedback assumptions.”

“Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.”

The extreme AGW supporters appear to live in a fantasy world. The solution they state is a new UN body with special powers that will “be capable of instilling a permanent crisis lasting decades, if not centuries.”

“Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries?”

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”….

…Among the proposals: a call to replace the largely ineffective U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development with a council that reports to the U.N. General Assembly, at attempt to better handle emerging issues related to water, climate, energy and food security. The report advocates a similar revamping of other international environmental institutions….
…Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: ….Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Germany’s Solar Industry Is In Trouble As Its Biggest Company Goes Bankrupt

Q-Cells, one of the biggest solar cell manufacturers in Germany and the world, has filed for bankruptcy, Spiegel Online reports. It’s the fourth German solar energy company to go bust in recent times.

Germany has been struggling with the decision to replace nuclear energy completely with renewable energy for a while. They are already struggling with a shortfall, which they have been forced to combat with exported nuclear energy in a seemingly counterproductive move.

“A sister issue is “where do the lukewarmers now stand in the face of this embarrassing development?”

It’s perfectly consistent with what we hold.
1. GHGs warming the planet.
2. Sensitivity is likely below 3C and as low as 1C ( about what Monckton thinks)
3. Natural cycles are probably larger than mainstream climate science thinks and less important than skeptics think

The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more …….There is a difference between “no warming” and “no statistically significant warming”. I am disappointed that so many skeptics have chosen to ignore the difference.
I agree, and I will address the 15 year point at the end.

But first, I must confess I find this statement very odd:

“THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend.“

I thought the Met office reluctantly agreed that the period of no warming was 16 years and not 17 years. But even here, according to Hadcrut4, there was some warming for 16 years, just not very significant. However there is this quote from the article:
“Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017”

This leaves me with 4 questions:
1. What were his exact words?
2. Exactly what did he mean by “pause”? Did he mean no warming or no significant warming?
3. Why would he add a year to what the MET said, (unless I missed the memo about the 17 years)?
4. Did he mix up the reference to 17 years with what the MET said about 2017?

Now with regards to the 15 years, 3 of the data sets actually show no warming for over 15 years. Note the bolded ones.

1. For GISS, the slope is flat since March 2001 or 11 years, 10 months. (goes to December)2. For Hadcrut3, the slope is flat since March 1997 or 15 years, 10 months. (goes to December)
3. For a combination of GISS, Hadcrut3, UAH and RSS, the slope is flat since December 2000 or an even 12 years. (goes to November)
4. For Hadcrut4, the slope is flat since November 2000 or 12 years, 2 months. (goes to December.)5. For Hadsst2, the slope is flat since March 1997 or 15 years, 10 months. (goes to December)
6. For UAH, the slope is flat since July 2008 or 4 years, 7 months. (goes to January)7. For RSS, the slope is flat since January 1997 or 16 years and 1 month. (goes to January)

How do you explain the same temperature rise early in the 20th Century [when CO2 was very low] with the most recent temperature rise, with 40% more CO2? It certainly appears that CO2 has had no special effect.

I do not believe in such exact coincidences. It looks to me as if the global temperature increased in spite of CO2 — not because of it. The two separate temperature increases appear to be entirely coincidental.

Here is more evidence that CO2 does not control the temperature. So I must ask: what would falsify your conjecture that human emitted CO2 is the primary cause of global warming? Or even a secondary cause?

Or, would 5,000 feet of glacier ice once again covering Chicago still fail to convince you that your “carbon” conjecture has some problems? Just wondering…

When we talk about reds, we do not mean card carrying members of the Party. We mean everyone who shares their beliefs though they would never attend a Party meeting.

I know what you mean, but it’s still wrong.

Also, we usually include the useful idiots.

They’re all reds. But some aren’t reds. But that’s alright because we’ll just call them “useful idiots” to gloss over the fact that the original statement is wrong.

Prince Charles is just an idiot. He is not a “useful idiot” to the left, because his position on almost everything is (small c) conservative. He’s a tree-hugger alright, but never a leftie one.

Why talk about the Party? It is ineffective in North America.

No-one is talking about the Party. I meant that political allegiances tend to determine the stance on AGW in the US, because its politics is so bitterly partisan.

The rest of the world isn’t like that. We have right wing Greens, and non-AGW believing leftists.

In NZ’s case, our previous Labour government pretended to care to placate the extremists, but carefully made sure the carbon trading scheme was unworkable. In nine years in power it managed to avoid any major environmental programs that actually cost them any money.

In Britain’s case, a Tory party has headed down the path of Green looniness.

Look for political climate scientists to adopt Beenstock and Reingewertz as their new rallying cry. A cut in CO2 is not what is needed, but a freeze in emission levels. This takes the Chinese out of the equation and makes emissions targets feasible. They can also claim that the lack of warming may be due to global recession.

Richard M says:
February 22, 2013 at 7:25 pm
“OMG, what will the flocks at SkS and closed mind do now?”

I like that – ‘closed mind’. Lol. Typical – closed mind is saying if you remove ENSO the warming is as expected. As if La Nina or El Nino would affect the GLOBAL temperature. It just shifts things around and makes one part of the world hot or cold and the other part wet or dry. The net difference has to be zero.

” Just updated my my global trend graphic for a public talk and noted the level has really been quite stable since 2000 or so and 2008 doesn’t look too hot …. Be awkward if we went through an early 1940s type swing!” Mick Kelly – Climategate emails.
So this pause has all happened before. Same old same old.
Why does everyone sound so surprised?
So all you climate gurus, What caused that pause? Because in all probability this one is just more of the same.

What I don’t understand is why Dr Rajendra Pachauri is stating that we have to wait 30 to 40 years at least before a breaking a long-term warming trend when he’s a railway engineer and various climate scientists have said 15 or 16 years would indicate a break with the long term trend.

What I’d like to know is what is the name of the scientist or organisation that is telling Dr Pachauri we have to wait 30 or 40 years? Or did he just make it up?

And don’t forget that those useful treeometers are telling us that it has been cooling since the mid/late 1960s!!

It is difficult to claim that the recent rise (if there be any) in extreme weather events these past 10 or 15 or 20 years has beeen caused by CO2 emissions when there has been no rise in temperatures during this period. Given the lack of warming, what exactly is said to have caused this rise in extreme waether events, and how has this been caused.

PS. I agree with others who have expressed unease with the needless and cheap shot belittling of Dr Pachauri. His qualifications are not to be sneered at, and this belittling adds nothing of substance to the article; in fact it distracts as does all ad hominems. I see no reason why we should join the other side in the gutter.

I have noticed that this has been a growing trend of Monckton’s approach of late. Unfortunate, since it does nothing to his own credability, still less to displaying the characteristics of being a gentleman. It would be in order to point out that Dr Pachauri does not possess qualifications relevant to climate science (but then again nor does Monckton). However, that is no real handicap, because it appears that there is little real and genuine science being practiced in the field of climate science. the scientific method for the main part has regrettably be thrown out.

Yes, the headline “Railroad Engineer” is a bit tacky, but when you consider the history of spin involved with CAGW, it is not surprising and can be considered reasonable.

Lord Monckton, Anthony Watts and virtually everyone who puts their head above the climate parapet, who does not have the correct ‘traction’ in the climate community is rubbished due to not possessing the ‘correct’ qualifications and experience or

Not being published in the ‘correct’ journals.

Lord Monckton has had to put up with extreme insults whenever he superbly argues his case.

Our friend Boris is no fool. He has designs on leading the Conservative party and hates the current leader. The AGW scam is only going one way – down the pan. Boris is positioning himself nicely to be untainted by the day of reckoning that will dawn for our political class that signed up to the AGW hysteria and condemned so many to fuel poverty.

Christopher, you may note that your figure is a time series graph of means and not variances. You are fighting a back-yard war. Just note what Obama said in January 2013. After Climategate in 2009, we got the Wonder-year 2010, the year of the weather extremes. Trenberth, still looking for the missing heat, suddenly realized where it was gone. Note that for establishing an upward trend of means we need 16 years of data, for a similar trend of variances about 160. That may be the updated life expectancy of the IPCC, and Pachauri knows it.

More model output from the IPCC will not change the science since the IPCC do not accept the science only their CO2 driven version of fairyland.
CO2 reacts with energy, true, but does it then do what is attributed to it, NO. The CO2 adsorbs energy, immediately emits energy, at a lower power level, and gets warm itself. All atmospheric CO2 on the day side of the planet is saturated with energy so it is impossible for these to adsorb any more to carry out the GHG thing. The GHG thing also violates the laws of thermodynamics. So a double whammy.
Water vapour does have an extra property. One that cools the surface, moves heat to high atmospheric levels and forms cloud that increases aldebo thus reducing the radiation reaching the surface from the sum. A magic thermostat. It is called evapouration and latent heat a simple physical process that requires lots of heat to achieve, more than 7 times the heat required to increase the temperature of water from 0C to 100C than to get that water to boil.

I understand your consternation. The planet itself is falsifying your belief system. You are getting exasperated that Planet Earth is not doing what you want it to do.

Oh dear – still doesn’t get it.

Planet Earth, as you put it, is behaving exactly as I would expect if CO2 sensitivity was about 1 deg C per 2xCO2

The conclusion is simple: CO2 just does not have the claimed effect.

Which claimed effect are you talking about? The evidence, thus far, suggests the effect claimed by lukewarmers is pretty much spot on.

In the post above Christopher Monckton states that “ The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4) “. This isn’t strictly true. The Hadcrut4 record shows there has been no statistically significant warming for 19 years. All this means is that there is a small probability that the true trend is ZERO (or less). I’ve just calculated the Hadcrut4 trend since Jan 1995 and it’s ~0.1 deg per decade, so the Least Squares trend is still positive.

If we were to perform a statistical hypothesis test in which the NULL hypothesis was 0.2 deg per decade warming then it’s likely that there would again be no statistically significant difference. In other words we wouldn’t be able to reject the possibility that warming over the last 18 (or 19 or whatever) years has been 0.2 deg per decade.

A lot of iffy conclusions can be drawn from how statistics are interpreted. The truth is that it is more likely than not that the world is warmer now than it was 18,19 … 23 or 30 years ago.

Thanks to Werner’s link (at skepticalscience) I can confirm that my thinking is correct, ie. while we cannt rule out a ZERO trend in the Hadcrut4 data, it’s also the case that we can’t rule out a 0.2 deg/decade trend. Since 1995 the Hadcrut4 trend is

Trend: 0.109 ±0.119 °C/decade (2σ)

Add a year or two or change the significance level by 5% (ie. use 90%) and you get a significant warming trend. It looks very much as though it’s still warming. There is certainly no cooling – or none that is anywhere near statistically significant.

John Finn: ‘If we were to perform a statistical hypothesis test in which the NULL hypothesis was 0.2 deg per decade warming then it’s likely that there would again be no statistically significant difference.’
I don’t buy this. Your hypothesis is called in statistics the alternative. What you are saying is that the power of the test decreases as the alternative value approaches zero, a fact well known in statistics. In stead of the word ‘likely’ you should give us the values of the Type II error for alternative slopes 0.1/ 0.2/0.3/0.4, etc. for n years of data and Type I error 0.05.

I’d be more worried if I was a strong advocate for solar forcing. The much heralded global cooling has yet to materialise despite the significant decline (now at pre-1900 levels) in solar activitiy.

I can’t see that any “advocate for solar forcing” need worry just yet. There is inevitably some degree of buffer caused by the fact that we are at solar high, half height though it is, perhaps also a ten year or so buffer from the previous record solar high.

In addition the tie up between low sunspot count and reduced temperatures seems good, even though the mechanism is not as yet well understood, the expectation of many scientists that the next solar cycle will be a record low for modern science, suggests that a cooling trend is a real if uncertain possibility.

Once it becomes clear that we are past the current solar plateau (high), if the subsequent decline to the next solar low proves to be drawn out then this would be another reason to expect cooling. Add in the AMO expected to enter a negative phase soon and all told I think that those solar advocates who expect cooling are probably sitting comfortably and have little need to worry.

As of today there’s not one mention of this incredible admission by Pachauri in the Marxist Guardian’s ‘environmental’ section. (Instead they have a typical scare-piece about how a currently non-occurring event may cause perma-frost to start ‘melting’) Funny that, as had it been the other way around, say a 17 year period of warming, it would no doubt be plastered all over the place.

They’re having trouble with this real inconvenient truth, there’s no doubt.

“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deviating from the trend, you are still around the trend,” Dr Pachauri said.
You will not be around the trend!!
What dr Pachauri neglected to say that if you have1-2 periods of flat or cooling global temperatures lasting10- 20-30 years , there is no way that your original forecasted trend of 3-6 C rise by 2100 is going to take place . .You will be closer to 0.6Crise by 2100 which is exactly the warming in the period 1900-2000. That is why we have been saying that they have exaggerated the trend to get public attention.and the urgency of the threat has been greatly overblown . Now their own words speak to the misinformation they give out

John Finn: ‘If we were to perform a statistical hypothesis test in which the NULL hypothesis was 0.2 deg per decade warming then it’s likely that there would again be no statistically significant difference.’

I don’t buy this. Your hypothesis is called in statistics the alternative.

Why is continued warming at 0.2 deg/decade the ALTERNATIVE hypothesis. After all the 0.2 deg warming trend is the status quo. It’s quite reasonable, therefore, to propose a hypothesis which asks whether that trend is continuing. At the 95% level we cannot reject a 0.2 deg warming trend.

Let me remind you of the post-1995 Hadcrut4 trend i.e.

0.109 ±0.119 °C/decade

That is, the true trend lies somewhere between -0.010 deg/decade and 0.228 deg/decade at the 95% confidence level.

Do you not agree that this interval includes a 0.2 deg/decade trend as well as a ZERO trend with the former slightly more probable than the latter. We quantify the respective probabilities of ‘less than zero’ and ‘greater than 0.2’ if you like but I’m not sure this will be particularly useful.

There are some things asserted by the newspaper journalist Monckton here, which are just wrong.

1. Monckton’s assertion of “no global warming for 16 years” is without any scientific basis, since it is not founded on valid empirical, statistical evidence. No detectability of a trend in a time series, which is a combination of a trend and fluctuations is not evidence for an absence of the trend. In statistics, a failure to reject the Null-hypothesis (Zero tropospheric or surface temperature trend in this case) does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (longer-term tropospheric/surface warming trend in this case). To establish empirical, statistical evidence for a true trend change one would have to show that the recent temperature record can be statistically significantly distinguished from the longer-term warming trend, which itself is statistically significant. However, such a statistical significance is not detectable either, at this point. Therefore, a conclusion according to which “global warming stopped” or similar as made by Monckton (and many other “skeptics”) lacks scientific validity.

Additionally, global warming as a physical process is much more than just a rise in the temperature of the troposphere or at the surface. In the big picture of the total planetary energy balance, it also includes the accumulated energy that goes into the melting of the ice caps and the glaciers of the planet, and the accumulation of heat in the oceans. Latter is much more important regarding the amount of additional energy accumulated due to the radiative perturbation coming from increasing greenhouse gases. The oceans are the major component of the climate system, which heats the atmosphere. The ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years. And the polar ice has been melting with an increasing rate both in the Arctic and Antarctic in recent decades.

2. According to the second hand source under the link provided by Monckton, Pachauri allegedly acknowledged a 17-year pause “in global temperature rise”, but it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. Thus, even according to this second hand information, Pachauri did not say there had been “no global warming”, if he said it would take 30 to 40 years to break the long-term global warming trend. Assuming the reporting is correct, Pachauri does not think that 17 years were sufficient to draw the conclusion global warming “stopped” or similar. Monckton apparently does some massaging of Pachauri’s alleged statement to reinterpret it as a confirmation of his own assertions, according to which global warming “stopped”.

3. Monckton also asserts following:

“Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.”

Besides the wrong reproduction of Pachauri’s statement here, as it was reported in the second hand source, this assertion by Monckton about such a statement in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008, which he uses to construct a contradiction between Pachauri’s alleged statement and this report, and to assert that the recent temperature record would indicate a discrepancy between “models and measured reality” is a (deliberate?) falsehood. There is no such statement made in the NOAA Report. Monckton has simply made this up or he does not understand what the NOAA Report says.

4. Contrary to the assertion made here by Monckton, there has not been any discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet, at least any which is statistically significant. The observed temperature record is still within the 2-sigma uncertainty range of the predicted temperature evolution, as it was provided by the ensemble of simulations with global climate models, which was used for the IPCC Report 2007:

The “Pause” in the warming also includes plenty of “Corrections” by the various climate bodies, without those it would show cooling.
John Finn says:
John, can I suggest that you have a look at some of the threads on Tallblokes web site, they may shake your belief in CO2 warming just a bit and the “Physics” behind the claim. Either way it is very good Scientific reading.http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/

I think Pachauri’s “30 or 40 years at least” remark demonstrates that TAGWPTB now recognize the 30-odd-year cyclical nature of warming and cooling. It should start warming again in another 15 years or so but it will take another 15 for it to be statistically significant.

That’s aeons in terms of being able to use the “crisis” to grow their power, so they’ll move on to something else. Actually, they already have.

“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend ”
The historical record shows that these periods of no warming and cooling last for much longer and as much as 40 years [ 1890-1930 and again 1940-1980] . If you have two of these periods before 2100 , kiss goodbye to your forecast of 3-6 C by 2100 or even 1-2 C. The figure of 0.6 C rise by 2100 looks better to me .

‘…soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from..’
I beg to differ, your Lordship – they will go on banging on about this non-event until the funding runs out – and the way that Western governments have swallowed this stuff it could be a long time before that happens…

I would love to see a YouTube debate, with a mutually agreed moderator and venue, between Lord Monckton and this purveyor of false assertions. It would be no contest. Perlwitz woud get a public thrashing for all his mendacious statements.

“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend ”
The historical record shows that these periods of no warming and cooling last for much longer and as much as 40 years [ 1890-1930 and again 1940-1980] . If you have two of these periods before 2100 , kiss goodbye to your forecast of 3-6 C by 2100 or even 1-2 C. The figure of 0.6 C rise by 2100 looks better to me .
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The material point is that now the driver, CO2, is rising rapidly, whereas before 1940, manmade CO2 was not significant, and since it is alleged by the warmists that CO2 is a powerful driver, there is now no reasonabkle explanation as to why the CO2 driven warming is not presently occuring.

The best case is that natural variation is at least as powerful as CO2 such that natural variation can swamp the CO2 warming signal. However, once you admit that, ie., that natural variation is at least as powerful as CO2, one can no longer assert that the only explanation for the post war late 1970s to 1998 warming must be CO2. That period can now be explained by natural variation and there is thus no longer any evidence in the temperature record which must be the result of CO2 induced warming. Everything in the temperature record can be explained by natural variation.

John Finn at 6:17 am. Parameter estimate and confidence interval is OK. I even prefer that procedure but it is not statistical hypothesis testing. Perhaps you should not talk about null hypotheses at all in this context.

In the incestuous world of the British loony tunes, anti global warming right, Lord Lawson’s son is married to Lord Monkton’s daughter. Lawson has open connections to the oil industry.

When Leicester archaeologists dug up the alleged body of King Richard III, they originally thought it was Lawson, but following extensive research, they discovered he was still alive.

Associate Lord (Viscount) Matt Ridley is a true right wing nutter who single handedly brought down the British economy. He brandished his optimism (he wrote a book called ‘The Rational Optimist’) by running his bank Northern Rock without money. He had to be bailed out by the Bank Of England.

The Scottish based Bishop Hill is neither Scottish, a bishop, nor a hill. His accent reveals his class origins. His recent article in The Spectator reveals his true purpose of scoring cheap political points for the Neanderthal right. The irony of the title will be lost on him.

James Delingpole is comedy writer who knew David Cameron at university but is miles to the right. He has created a persona close to a well known TV character, Conservative MP, Alan B@stard.

The Guardian’s most consistent message on global warming is that the only people who oppose it are right wing nut jobs. They could have added upper class in Britain. Every single one of these evolutionary throwbacks is a gift to their opponents.

Exactly right. The conjecture that CO2 is causing global warming has been deconstructed by the temperature record. Here is a chart with data provided by arch-warmist Phil Jones, which shows the same warming trends when CO2 was very low, and when CO2 is high. The trends are almost identical, indicating that CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperature.

Thus, the “carbon” scare is falsified. CO2 may cause some minor, insignificant warming. But because it is too small to measure, it can be completely disregarded.

Realize that this has all come about due to CFCs and the Ozone Hole. Again, false science, completely justified by “finding a cause”, i.e., it must be CFCs [see all our data]. Oh, by the way, the Sun never changes, so therefore, it must be CFCs.

The “scientists” got CFCs banned, but the Ozone Hole[s] still haven’t closed. Oh well, forget that, CO2 is the new “bogey man”. And like CFCs, we have the solution; just give us lots of money and we will fix the problem.

My thoughts are that turning Earth’s heat to electricity is the best way to go. I have a new patent that uses a new thermodynamic cycle [gravity and heat] to capture the Earth’s [low temperature] heat energy and convert it directly to electricity.

I take it you are not a Lord of any sort, because your comments reek of class envy. If the House of Lords was a race, you would get in big trouble for denigrating them with a wide brush like you did. But since it’s politics, I guess you can make all the ad hominem comments you like.

Americans don’t understand what the big deal is. Apparently the British class system does strange things to some folks’ psyche. I routinely come across comments like yours, and I still don’t understand the reason for the underlying hatred. Is it because a Lord is more attractive to the ladies? Or what? What makes a person bad just because they have a title?

Steven Mosher says:
February 22, 2013 at 9:03 pm
“A sister issue is “where do the lukewarmers now stand in the face of this embarrassing development?”

It’s perfectly consistent with what we hold.
1. GHGs warming the planet.
2. Sensitivity is likely below 3C and as low as 1C ( about what Monckton thinks)
3. Natural cycles are probably larger than mainstream climate science thinks and less important than skeptics think

Or one could consider:
1) GHGs also cool the atmosphere. Why do some people always ignore this physics?
2) Sensitivity could be zero. Without adjustments there was almost no warming in the 20th century.
3) By removing faulty adjustments and accounting for siting problems plus UHI it appears natural cycles explains 99% of the temperature variation over the temperature record.

“No detectability of a trend in a time series, which is a combination of a trend and fluctuations is not evidence for an absence of the trend.”

Oh dear. Nobody (and I’m sure Monckton is included in this) is asserting that warming cannot start up again at some future time or that the longer term (30 year) trend must end. Monckton is making the valid observation that there has been no trend for the last 18 or 19 years. This is then used to invite comments around such things as, oh, I dunno – how skillfull are the models in predicting trends?

“The oceans are the major component of the climate system, which heats the atmosphere. The ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years.”

Has it? From what I’ve read, the argo dataset shows either a flat or declining trend depending on when you start. Even Trenberth talked of the “missing heat.” Where has it gone? Have you got a reference for your assertion?

No error bars, no information about statistical significance of this “declining” temperature in the figure. Therefore, this graphic does not allow any scientific conclusion about absence or presence of a global warming trend in those temperature records for the shown time period. And, in addition to that, the time period goes only from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2012, which are only 11 years, not even 16 years, according to my math. Who is Stealey trying to deceive here? This graphic does not refute what I said, and it certainly does not prove that I was a “liar”.

And in response to my previous statement:
“Contrary to the assertion made here by Monckton, there has not been any discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet, at least any which is statistically significant.”

he accuses me again to be a

“Liar.”

pointing to following link:

A graphic without referenced source. What are the alleged numbers in the graphic? Where are they coming from? What are “IPCC high (2.8)”, “IPCC best (2.0)”, and “IPCC low (1.3)” supposed to mean? What are the straight lines supposed to show?

Different scenarios come with different numbers for the average projection and the uncertainty range. The uncertainty range there is based on “expert judgement”. The lowest is 1.1 K as lower bound for the B1 scenario and 6.4 K as upper bound for the A1Fl scenario. I don’t see any of the numbers from the graphic presented by Stealey.

Also, the graphic presented by Stealey does not show any 95% range of the temperature projections for present day from the whole ensemble of simulations done with the global climate models, which were used for the IPCC Report 2007. Thus, it does not contain any information that allows a conclusion about the statistical significance of any difference between mean model projections and recently observed temperature record.

A graphic with 95%-range of all modeled temperature realizations compared with the only one realization that is provided by Nature for the recent period can be found here:

“Monckton is making the valid observation that there has been no trend for the last 18 or 19 years.”

And exactly this conclusion drawn by Monckton and, as is seems, by “skeptics” in general is not scientifically valid, when it is based on a lack of statistical significance of the trend estimate. A failure to reject the Null-hypothesis (Zero-trend) for a given probability threshold does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (presence of a trend), since it cannot be excluded the possibility that this lack of statistical significance is just coming from fluctuations in the limited data set, which are masking the trend that can be seen in the extended time series. Non-detectability of a trend is not the same as absence of a trend.

“Has it? From what I’ve read, the argo dataset shows either a flat or declining trend depending on when you start. Even Trenberth talked of the “missing heat.” Where has it gone? Have you got a reference for your assertion?”

As always, I am very grateful to most of those who have commented. But the usual suspects remain unrepentant, and certain false statements by one of them – Jan Perlwitz, whose intention seems to have been to flog the dead horse that is climate alarm by getting the facts carefully wrong – require answers so that no one is misled.

1. Perlwitz says I was wrong to say there was no global warming for 16 years. At the time, I was right: none of the principal global-warming datasets showed any warming statistically distinguishable from zero for 16 years, if one determined the trend by linear regression However, Engineer Pachauri is correct to point out that the absence of warming, on all major datasets., has now persisted for at least 17 years. On the RSS dataset, the absence of warming has endured for 23 years.

3. Perlwitz says that both ice-caps have been melting in recent decades. However, the University of Illinois’ data show that the Antarctic sea-ice extent shows a rising trend during the 33 years of the satellite era. Since most of Antarctica has been cooling, it is probable that the land-baed ice there is continuing to accumulate. Theory would lead us to expect that the high plateau of East Antarctica, where the bulk of the world’s ice resides, is at too high an altitude and latitude to permit much melting, and the IPCC finds that significant ice loss will occur only after several millennia of global mean surface temperatures above today’s.

4. Perlwitz says the ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years. So it has, if one goes back far anough, but it has done so at a rate four and a half times slower than the computer models had predicted.

5. Perlwitz says a 17-year pause in global warming is not the same thing as 17 years with no global warming. I decline to be drawn into pusillanimous semantics of this vapid kind.

6. Perlwitz says the NOAA’s State of the Climate report did not say that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality. However, that is what they did say. One understands that their comment is uncongenial to Perlwitz after 17 years without global warming, but facts are facts and Perlwitz should not seek to mislead readers by stating that which is not true.

7. Perlwitz says there has not been any statistically-significant discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet. However, the rate of warming since the IPCC’s first report in 1990 has been less than half what the IPCC had then predicted, and the discrepancy is indeed significant in that the actual rate of warming falls outwith the measurement uncertainties specified in the IPCC’s 1990 prediction.

It appears that Perlwitz has willfully attempted to mislead readers with a series of outright falsehoods. If so, Perlwitz does no favors to the climate-extremist cause and should perhaps go and play trains somewhere else – with Engineer Pachauri, perhaps.

Error bars are not necessary to show a long term trend. But if error bars are desired, see here.

Note that the long term rising trend line has not accelerated, and that the climate Null Hypothesis has never been falsified: current climate parameters were routinely exceeded in the past, meaning that nothing unusual or unprecedented is now occurring. As a matter of fact, the past century and a half has been extremely benign, with only an ≈0.8ºC natural recovery from the LIA. Temperatures have changed by tens of degrees within decades during the fairly recent past, therefore a minuscule 0.8º fluctuation is essentially a flat line. Nothing unprecedented is happening, despite the fervent wishes of the alarmist crowd for several degrees of global warming. But it isn’t happening; quite the opposite, in fact.

The entire CO2=CAGW scam is based on the false alarm claiming that rising “carbon” will cause runaway global warming. This is, of course, complete nonsense. In fact, every alarmist prediction has failed. In any normal, honest scientific field, the total failure of all predictions would result in a cutoff of public funding. But not in ClimAstrology, in which the system has been gamed by scam artists and pal reviewed journals. Money has thoroughly corrupted most climate scientists.

Vince Causey says:

“From what I’ve read, the argo dataset shows either a flat or declining trend depending on when you start. Even Trenberth talked of the ‘missing heat.’ Where has it gone? Have you got a reference for your assertion?”

The ARGO buoy system shows that there is no “missing heat” lurking in the oceans. Even Pachauri has now been forced to climb down from his alarming projections. Despite all his usual weasel words, he is now admitting that the IPCC was flat wrong in its wild-eyed predictions. All these jokers are being forced to climb down by the ultimate Authority: Planet Earth itself, which is falsifying their True Beliefs.

Finally, I note that the ARGO database has been “adjusted” just like the GISS temperature database. Any data subsequent to the ARGO adjustment is worthless. It was done specifically to show non-existent heat. Here is a chart of the pre-adjustment ARGO data. Post-adjustment ARGO ‘data’ is not reliable, and in fact, it is not actual data at all, but a modeled output.

Thank you for your link on NOAAs ocean heat content. The graph shows that the ocean globally averaged temperature in the period for which ARgo is active is rising. However, the Argo dataset itself shows a declining trend (see D B Stealeys link in the comment above). When I see two representations of the same phenomena which contradict each other, I become more skeptical of assertions such as “Ocean heat content is rising.”

1. Monckton’s assertion of “no global warming for 16 years” is without any scientific basis, since it is not founded on valid empirical, statistical evidence. No detectability of a trend in a time series, which is a combination of a trend and fluctuations is not evidence for an absence of the trend. In statistics, a failure to reject the Null-hypothesis (Zero tropospheric or surface temperature trend in this case) does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (longer-term tropospheric/surface warming trend in this case). To establish empirical, statistical evidence for a true trend change one would have to show that the recent temperature record can be statistically significantly distinguished from the longer-term warming trend, which itself is statistically significant. However, such a statistical significance is not detectable either, at this point. Therefore, a conclusion according to which “global warming stopped” or similar as made by Monckton (and many other “skeptics”) lacks scientific validity.

This empty invocation of formal semantics is nothing less than a heroic effort on Jan’s part to keep his eyes firmly shut to the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for 16 years, even though atmospheric CO2 has steadily been climbing all the while. He pretends that the problem is that we can’t detect a trend, as if the temperatures we’ve been seeing over the past 16 years have been completely chaotic, instead of bouncing up and down with a bit of noise centering on a +.2C anomaly value as they’ve clearly been doing.
But apparently, this is insufficient to dispel the unease hidden in the murk of Perlwitz’s mind, because he feels the need for more rationalization:

Additionally, global warming as a physical process is much more than just a rise in the temperature of the troposphere or at the surface. In the big picture of the total planetary energy balance, it also includes the accumulated energy that goes into the melting of the ice caps and the glaciers of the planet, and the accumulation of heat in the oceans. Latter is much more important regarding the amount of additional energy accumulated due to the radiative perturbation coming from increasing greenhouse gases. The oceans are the major component of the climate system, which heats the atmosphere. The ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years. And the polar ice has been melting with an increasing rate both in the Arctic and Antarctic in recent decades.

So, we may NEVER actually see any warming, and it won’t invalidate his theory. With this defense against reality in place he moves on to the attack. Monckton is wrong about Pachauri. Having recently gone through a similar exercise on the last episode of Jan’s World, I’m going to pass on taking this apart piece by piece. Here’s the quote Monckon is referring to, decide for yourselves what this means:

“Unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgment by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.”

Not satisfied with the level of stupidity thus far demonstrated, Jan cranks it up a notch:

this assertion by Monckton about such a statement in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008, which he uses to construct a contradiction between Pachauri’s alleged statement and this report, and to assert that the recent temperature record would indicate a discrepancy between “models and measured reality” is a (deliberate?) falsehood. There is no such statement made in the NOAA Report.

Once again, decide for yourselves:

“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

Jan’s World concludes that the models haven’t been proven wrong yet. We’re still within the error bars. To refresh your memory on what this looks like, look here:

That’s it for this week, thanks for watching another madcap episode of Jan’s World!

“Oh dear – still doesn’t get it. Planet Earth, as you put it, is behaving exactly as I would expect if CO2 sensitivity was about 1 deg C per 2xCO2”

I am afraid that John Finn doesn’t get it. I’ll try to explain using visual aids and small words:

In this chart we see that global warming went up steadily after 1900. During that first rise, CO2 was very low; under 300 ppmv. Yet the rise is exactly the same as the later rise beginning after 1980, when CO2 was much higher.

We see the same natural causes at work in this chart. No matter how high or low the CO2 level, the natural rise in temperature is the same.

Here we see the long term naturally rising trend. Notice again that no matter how high or low CO2 is, the trend remains the same. There is no acceleration of global warming. That is the key point: CO2 makes no measurable difference.

If CO2 had the claimed effect on temperature, then global temperatures would be accelerating. But they are not. That scientific fact falsifies the CO2=CAGW conjecture.

Now, CO2 may have some minuscule effect. But since any such effect is too small to measure, AGW remains only a conjecture. Claiming that the 0.8ºC rise must be due to CO2, without having any measurements to verify that claim, is simply the Argumentum ad Ignorantium fallacy: “Since I can’t think of any other cause, then CO2 must be the cause of global warming.” But the scientific evidence does not support that conclusion.

The demonization of “carbon” is built on that particular fallacy. But you cannot reach an accurate conclusion based on a fallacy. [Sorry about the big words.]

The article in The Australian does NOT provide a direct quote for the “17-year” pause.

It says:

~~~start quote of article~~~

“Dr Pachauri said global average temperatures had plateaued at record levels and that the halt did not disprove global warming.

“The climate is changing because of natural factors and the impact of human actions,” Dr Pachauri said.

“If you look at temperatures going back 150 years, there are clearly fluctuations which have occurred largely as a result of natural factors: solar activity, volcanic activity and so on.

“What is quite perceptible is, in the last 50 years, the trend is upwards.

“This is not to say you won’t have ups and downs – you will – but what we should be concerned about is the trend, and that is being influenced now to a large extent by human actions.”

He said that it would be 30 to 40 years “at least” before it was possible to say that the long-term upward trend in global temperatures had been broken.

“If you look at the last century, records tell you that the increase in average surface temperature has been 0.74C,” he said.

“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deviating from the trend – you are still around the trend.”

~~~end article quote~~~

Without Mr. Lloyd’s interview notes or interview recording, there is no way to know waht, if anything, Lloyd took to be the basis of this lead-in ==> “THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises”

(It cost me a dollar to find this out — so now I have 27 more days of access to an Australian newspaper — what a treat! /sarc)

Lord Monckton deliberately misleads us with a headline calling Dr. Pachauri a “railroad engineer,” suggesting he is a locomotive engineer, train operator, or engine driver. There is much to criticize about what the perpetual head of the IPCC says and does – but no justification for misrepresenting what he is: an educated professional with a Phd. in industrial engineering and economics from one of America’s most respected public universities.

I would expect such tactics from the likes of Gleick, Lewandowsky or McKibben, but am disappointed to find it used – and defended – in a respectable sceptic forum.

Kip Hansen says:
February 23, 2013 at 11:52 am
The article in The Australian does NOT provide a direct quote for the “17-year” pause…
—————–
I think you’re right. I think the quote I cited was actually Lloyd.

“Lord Monckton deliberately misleads us with a headline calling Dr. Pachauri a “railroad engineer,” suggesting he is a locomotive engineer, train operator, or engine driver.”

I don’t know what country you come from, but in the UK, where Lord Monckton is from, an engineer implies someone who has graduated from university with a first degree or higher in one of the engineering sciences and who is employed in an applied science role. Nobody would take the label to mean what you have taken it to mean – someone who drives a train.

But, with regard to judging a persons competence, do citations of academic qualifications really matter? As Forrest Gump would say – stupid is as stupid does.

“Here we see the long term naturally rising trend. Notice again that no matter how high or low CO2 is, the trend remains the same. There is no acceleration of global warming. That is the key point: CO2 makes no measurable difference.”

I’m not sure that alarmists claim that increased CO2 should cause temperature to go up at an accelerating rate. Certainly, if you take the forcing due to CO2 increases without feedback, each unit increase in ppCO2 would lead to a smaller increase in temperature due to the logarithmic nature of the relationship between forcing and concentration.

If acceleration is implied by models, that could only be due to supposed positive feedbacks, which are looking increasingly unlikely.

“This empty invocation of formal semantics is nothing less than a heroic effort on Jan’s part to keep his eyes firmly shut to the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for 16 years, even though atmospheric CO2 has steadily been climbing all the while.”

What I find fascinating is the casual way that people like Jan wave away the stalled warming. I know, I know, there is a narrow sense in which Jan is right, that a stalling of warming does not prove the absence of a longer trend, and there are any number of reasons for why the trend may have stalled.

But surely, anybody with a modicum of curiosity – that is, anyone with more than 2 brain cells – would find this observation to be of great interest. Any open minded person, I would have thought, no matter how much they believed in cAGW, would surely be thinking that maybe, just maybe, they’ve got things wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t worse than we thought.

But they don’t. There is instead, a concerted effort to beat down countervailling evidence, as if they have to be right at any cost. And that tells me all I need to know about the openess – or otherwise – of their so called minds.

“Railroad engineer – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – A railroad engineer, locomotive engineer, train operator, train driver or engine driver is a person who operates a train on a railroad or railway. The use of the term “Engineer” to describe this occupation should not be confused with professional engineer.”

It is ironic that Lord Monckton, who frequently and vigorously defends his qualifications, feels a need to mischaracterise Dr. Pachauri’s.

Tongue in cheek
The fallacy was in expecting global warming to be manifested by increased temperatures. A lack of increased temperatures, therefor, should not be considered as evidence contrary to global warming. Since we know that it does exist, we must now find the appropriate metric that demonstrates it and the best label for it. There is something happening out there. Of that, we can be sure.

Vince Causey says:
February 23, 2013 at 1:01 pm
…
What I find fascinating is the casual way that people like Jan wave away the stalled warming.
… Any open minded person, I would have thought, no matter how much they believed in cAGW, would surely be thinking that maybe, just maybe, they’ve got things wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t worse than we thought.

But they don’t. There is instead, a concerted effort to beat down countervailling evidence, as if they have to be right at any cost. And that tells me all I need to know about the openess – or otherwise – of their so called minds.
——————–
Yep. I like being right and dislike being wrong as much as anybody, probably more than most. I’ve always figured the best way to do that is to change my mind when reality doesn’t look to be supporting the theory. I don’t really see the point in playing make believe.

“Railroad engineer – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – A railroad engineer, locomotive engineer, train operator, train driver or engine driver is a person who operates a train on a railroad or railway. The use of the term “Engineer” to describe this occupation should not be confused with professional engineer.”

It is ironic that Lord Monckton, who frequently and vigorously defends his qualifications, feels a need to mischaracterise Dr. Pachauri’s.

– – – – – – – –

bladeshearer,

Your emphasis on Monckton’s reference to Pachauri’s railroad education and experience has some element of irony in it too.

Pachauri’s podium to speak from in order to defend himself from critics is vastly larger in reach than Monckton’s. Pachauri has an amount of easy MSM access at his mere pleasure that Monckton can only dream of having.

Cannot Pachauri surely explain from his powerful podium how important his railroad related education and experience uniquely qualifies him more than many eminent climate academics to lead the IPCC? N’est ce pas?

Dr. Pachauri is not a “railroad” engineer. He is an industrial engineer. His field is engineering and economics as it relates to development. He has been working in the field of energy and resource management for more than 30 years. Whatever criticism one might have of him, his knowledge base or education would not be one of them. If that is how he is characterized in the article, how reliable is the rest of the information in it? It casts doubt on the entire article in my mind. After all, it is not intended to present information in an unbiased way. It is intended to mislead. Quoting this source is not all that much better than quoting a supermarket tabloid as evidence that Elvis is still alive or aliens have been cited recently. It is, pure and simple, bad journalism.

I agree with your analysis that the log effect of additional CO2 results in very little warming. I have made that same argument many times, repeatedly posting this chart as corroboration.

But the alarmist crowd still argues otherwise. I have been in a running debate with two specific individuals, both of whom insist that global warming is “accelerating” due to the rise in CO2. I understand that they do not speak for everyone on their side. But ever since Michael Mann’s original hockey stick chart was published falsely showing skyrocketing acceleration of global warming, many believers take MBH98/99 and Mann08 as gospel.

Unbiased scientific data falsifies their assertions. There is simply no acceleration of global warming. Quite the contrary; global warming has stalled for the past decade and a half. But none of that matters to true believers in the “carbon” scare. A large number of them believe, contrary to widespread empirical evidence, that the rise in CO2 is causing acceleration of global warming. They are probably beyond being convinced otherwise. But their claims should not go unchallenged. Otherwise, casual readers could get the incorrect idea that global temperatures are rising exponentially.

For once and for all, silence. There is no such thing as global warming. If there was, it would be warmer now than it was ten years ago. Just think of it in simple terms like that. Warm current temperatures usurping past temps. That’s the pattern we should expect. But it’s not what is happening. If not, why not? Is global warming taking a rest? Is global warming looking on like a disinterested tag team wrestler waiting to be tagged back into a game already won? No.

Look. Temperatures have not increased significantly. More than that, they have not increased…significantly. The temps now are not significantly higher than they were in the past. But because of error bars, a definite fact of no temp rise = temps could have possibly risen 100%.

Logic has left the nest. It is no longer a requirement of science. Tell a good story, and you tell good science. There is zero interest in facts any more. Just emote. If you make a passionate argument it is a thousand times more effective than a truthful argument. People need to act as instructed, not with their own control. There are too many individuals for the Earth to support them. The only answer is physical murder. Populations must be reduced 1000% for life to continue. Hence why human life is referred to as a plague.

Furthermore: in the present we only glimpse at the future. Why would anyone stop now? The punishment is never-ending. Carbon Dioxide is released, and the Devil Himself approves of the disorder created. There is no rational counter-argument…because the initial argument is not rational itself. Because the initial assumptions are that CO2 must have this effect due to its physical, radiative properties. Therefore no matter what happens, it proves and confirms the initial argument. If temps increase, then of course that is right because CO2 increases mean it must. If temps remain stable or decrease, then that is evidence of CO2 influencing the atmosphere on a more subtle way. There is nothing that can disprove the ultimate hypothesis. The hypothesis cannot be tested because everything is expected. Warmth and coldness are one. Everything has been and always will be again. Nothing is different enough to ever prove anything. Proof is not science. Science is not evidence. Evidence is not proof. Proof is not proof. 2+2=5 if that is the safest conclusion. 2+2=4 is a dangerous conclusion. Take the lesser road in every case. Trust no-one.

I can’t quite summarise it enough. Everything that happens in reality is such sublime satire that nothing can ever make the equivalent perfect point, and match it. It passes for science because it is so ludicrous that it cannot be considered to be satire, therefore previously rational minds recognise it for reality. If it is not a joke then it must be real. We are literally talking about alarmism, related to a warming planet, where in fact all evidence points to nothing having changed…but still, we are told it must have changed. There are people praying for the death of civilisation just so they were right about a tedious nothing.

There are people praying for an increase in temps, so they can say “I was right”. I was right, we will all burn, we have destroyed the Earth, humanity is a plague, we burn and rape all the Earths resources. We deserve to die. We should pray for the annihilation of all humanity. And yet…nothing is up. It’s just a bunch of people praying for our bloody demise. Because their ego insists that they have changed the Earth.

Kip Hansen says:
February 23, 2013 at 11:52 am
The article in The Australian does NOT provide a direct quote for the “17-year” pause.

I strongly suspected there was no direct quote from Pachauri admitting no warming for 17 years, but wasn’t willing to spend the dollar to find out. He like others is still talking of roughly a decade “pause”, and requiring a full climate definition period of 30 years or more. Tempest in a teapot time, unfortunately

@Graham W – I hear you! Conversation with my 20 year old this morning. Agreeing that we actually do live in the best time possible to be alive, my daughter says that she constantly feels there must be something bad just round the corner. She says she “can’t help feeling like something bad will happen”. I see the “middle-class guilt” everywhere, I used to have it myself, when I believed in AGW. I’m so lucky, I don’t deserve it. I think that’s where it is. It’s crazy!

No one of us alive no how it feels to be in a climate optimum. So nobody can now that this is the best time to be alive. We are tolt so that this is the best time. But is that true?

Than my Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley i trust you be richt in the first place becaus you now where you talking about. But can you give us the proof that Pachauri said there is no warming?
All i get is a paper where i have to pay and there at this time the tekst is removed allrady.
So it would be need to have some hard proof. Most funny would be a video.

I see that the trolls are out in farce again, trying to deny that Engineer Pachauri has admitted that there has been no global warming for 17 years..

Here is the opening sentence of Graham Lloyd’s article in “The Australian”:

“THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend.”

If anyone wants to claim that Engineer Pachauri did not say what Mr. Lloyd reported him as having said, perhaps some evidence would be more convincing than unfounded denial..

Of course it is disconcerting to the trolls that the current absence of global warming approaches two decades in length (and, on the RSS data, approaches a quarter of a century). It is no doubt still more upsetting to them that Engineer Pachauri now admits what the mainstream media had been trying so very hard to conceal. None of the wretched models on which the global warming scam is unsoundly founded predicted this long stasis. Yet it has happened. Follow Engineer Pachauri’s example, and get used to it.

many of the above ”do not get it”!
So called GHG’s help cool the planet. The moon, no atmosphere, has a ”day” solar zenith temperature of 121C with the same insolation as we get a desert temperature of +60C max and a rainforest temperature of under 40C. How do GHG’s heta anything they are not an independent source of energy.

I am skeptic so AGWers call me a troll. But the fun part is that trolls appear only in fantasies and we now that AGW all is about fantasies. Be leaving in things not there.

And dear lord Monckton of Brenchley your right about the data clear as
ice but AGWers don’t see that. So the head of the IPCC admitting there is no warming is a big deal and they will do every thing to declare there is not some statement about this any where.

And I already think the newspaper has edited the evidence out of the paper so there is no proof anymore.
Having hard evidence of the statement proofs that
A Pachauri rely mate the statement
B we cane all see that the newspaper had edited out the important stuff to hide the truth.

The alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2 position (aka the IPCC position) was constructed on a ~3 tiered foundation. The IPCC house, if you will, can fall down but not in the way some independent critics might think.

Tier #1 => The uppermost foundational tier of the IPCC house (supported by the other tiers) is the science research that was ‘selected’ / ‘endorsed’. The structural weakness of this foundational tier is significant because of the significant bulk of science research that was ignored or blocked to achieve the IPCC’s position (the alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2 position). This tier is crumbling rapidly in the broader climate science community. But the IPCC house can still be supported by the other tiers even if tier #1 fails.

Tier #2 => is the ideological creators / organizers and the motivators for both : a) the funding of tier #1 , and b) the creating, continuance and funding the IPCC house itself. The significant weakness of this tier is its preference for a hidden presumption of there being a fundamental need for a drastic current political orientation shift toward a more totalitarian one . If that hidden preference is clearly opened to the public then this tier collapses. This tier is no where near a state of collapsing. But there are increasing numbers of publicly announced red flags about this foundational tier of the IPCC house. But even if both tier #1 & #2 entirely collapse the IPCC house can still stand if foundational tier #3 still stands.

Tier #3 => is the media, whether the MSM or the independent blogosphere. Without the broad foundational support of this tier the IPCC house cannot exist even if tier #1 & 2 are intact. Is this critical tier weakening in support of the IPCC house? I do not know. Opinions?

“As always, I am very grateful to most of those who have commented. But the usual suspects remain unrepentant, and certain false statements by one of them – Jan Perlwitz, whose intention seems to have been to flog the dead horse that is climate alarm by getting the facts carefully wrong – require answers so that no one is misled.”

Well, Mr. Monckton, I suppose you appreciate the ones who only applaud to your drivel, blindly believe your assertions at face value, and do not care about fact checking. Let’s see who really has got the facts wrong and is doing the misleading.

“1. Perlwitz says I was wrong to say there was no global warming for 16 years. At the time, I was right: none of the principal global-warming datasets showed any warming statistically distinguishable from zero for 16 years, if one determined the trend by linear regression”

This statement is just a repetition of your previous assertion. And it still contains the same scientifically invalid reasoning. Lack of statistical significance for a given probability threshold of a trend estimate done for a time-series does not allow the conclusion of the absence of a trend, since it cannot be excluded the possibility that this lack of statistical significance is just due to a too small sampling size of the data set. This is just Statistics 101. Concluding an absence of global warming from the lack of statistical significance of a trend estimate of the temperature for a limited data set is logically a non-sequitur. The difference between non-detectability and absence of a trend is not just semantics. It is a difference in the substance.

I do not see that you have explained why the logical reasoning usually valid in statistics is not supposed to apply for your reasoning, based on which you assert a “stop” of global warming or similar. Therefore, you have not refuted what I replied to your assertion, nor have you provided any scientifically valid evidence for the alleged “stop” in global warming, which you are asserting. Just endlessly repeating your assertion does not make it true.

“However, Engineer Pachauri is correct to point out that the absence of warming, on all major datasets., has now persisted for at least 17 years. On the RSS dataset, the absence of warming has endured for 23 years.”

Obviously, if Pachauri says at the same time that this was not enough time “to break the long-term global warming trend”, according to the second hand source “The Australian”, Pachauri does not think “a 17-year pause in the global temperature rise” means that global warming had stopped. You cannot both have the physical process of global warming and don’t have it at the same time. A statement and its negation can’t be both true at the same time.

And let’s do some fact checking regarding the assertion about those 17 years, which is also your assertion, Mr. Monckton.

All those five data sets have a positive trend estimate for the recent 17 years, although RSS seems to be an outlier to the downside. The trend in GISTEMP is statistically significant with at least 90% probability, the trends in the NOAA and HadCRUT4 data sets are both statistically significant with at least 80% probability over the recent 17 years.

Thus, how do these data allow the assertion of an “absence” of a trend in allegedly all of the major data sets of the temperature? Your assertion, Mr. Monckton, does not hold up to fact checking.

If Pachauri really had said that there had been “a 17-year pause in the global temperature rise” I would dispute his statement, based on those numbers above. Only, I do not trust hearsay newspaper reporting about these things. First, I would have to see a full transcript of what Pachauri actually said, before I believed that.

What “consequences”? I did not talk about consequences of global warming at all. Now you are just making something up I have not said. I was explicitly talking about the increase in the global ocean heat content and the melting of the polar ice caps. These are primary physical processes related to global warming, which are occurring now, not just some consequences. Actually, the tropospheric and surface warming are more physical effects of a cause, which follow the increase in the ocean heat content. More than 80% of the energy from the radiative perturbation due to increasing greenhouse gases goes into heating of the oceans. The energy is accumulated in the ocean, which, in turn, are the major component that heats the troposphere then. The heat release from the oceans to the atmosphere just does not happen in a linear fashion. Thus, I would say, for the diagnosis of global warming as a physical process, the long-term increase in the global ocean heat content is more relevant than the increase in the tropospheric/surface temperature. For the just mentioned physical reasons.

“3. Perlwitz says that both ice-caps have been melting in recent decades. However, the University of Illinois’ data show that the Antarctic sea-ice extent shows a rising trend during the 33 years of the satellite era. Since most of Antarctica has been cooling, it is probable that the land-baed ice there is continuing to accumulate.”

I deliberately said polar ice caps. The Antarctic sea-ice is only a minor component of the southern polar ice cap. Most of the ice mass is accumulated in the glaciers on the Antarctic continent. The Antarctic glaciers are net melting, according to published science, e.g., the most recent paper by Shepherd et al., Science (2012). The abstract:

“We combined an ensemble of satellite altimetry, interferometry, and gravimetry data sets using common geographical regions, time intervals, and models of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment to estimate the mass balance of Earth’s polar ice sheets. We find that there is good agreement between different satellite methods—especially in Greenland and West Antarctica—and that combining satellite data sets leads to greater certainty. Between 1992 and 2011, the ice sheets of Greenland, East Antarctica, West Antarctica, and the Antarctic Peninsula changed in mass by –142+/-49, +14+/-43, –65+/-26, and –20+/-14 gigatonnes year^1, respectively. Since 1992, the polar ice sheets have contributed, on average, 0.59+/-0.20 millimeter year^1 to the rate of global sea-level rise.”

In Figure 5 in the paper, one can see that the ice melt has not “stopped” in recent years. Neither in Antarctica, nor in Greenland. The trend has been about steady (note: I correct my statement from my previous comment with respect to that.) downward in Antarctica, whereas the melting has accelerated in Greenland in recent years. The combined rate of decline has increased as well.

My statements about the melting of the polar ice caps are based on scientific references, on results from scientific research published in peer reviewed journals. What do you have to offer to back up your statements, Mr. Monckton, except for the one about the Antarctic sea ice, which I do not dispute?

“4. Perlwitz says the ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years. So it has, if one goes back far anough, but it has done so at a rate four and a half times slower than the computer models had predicted.”

Which would say something about the simulations done with the models, if this was true, nothing about the fact itself. However, please provide a source for your assertion, according to which the observed increase in the global ocean heat anomaly was four and a half times slower than the rate of what has been predicted with models. Otherwise, it is just another one of your assertions that are backed up with nothing.

“5. Perlwitz says a 17-year pause in global warming is not the same thing as 17 years with no global warming. I decline to be drawn into pusillanimous semantics of this vapid kind.”

Now, that is just a falsehood by you. I have not made such a statement. Again, you are inventing something I have not said. Are you trying to distract the audience? Or, if you insist that I allegedly said this, what about a quote with proof of source?

“6. Perlwitz says the NOAA’s State of the Climate report did not say that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality. However, that is what they did say. One understands that their comment is uncongenial to Perlwitz after 17 years without global warming, but facts are facts and Perlwitz should not seek to mislead readers by stating that which is not true.”

The proper response would have been here to provide the evidence for your assertion that the alleged statement can be found in the NOAA Report, by providing a quote to the alleged statement and a link so that everyone can do the fact checking.

However, you only have replied here by a mere repetition of your previous assertions, still not backing it up with anything, and an ad hominem comment about my person. Is this all, Mr. Monckton?

I could speculate about the reasons why you shy away from providing a quote and a proper link.

“7. Perlwitz says there has not been any statistically-significant discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet. However, the rate of warming since the IPCC’s first report in 1990 has been less than half what the IPCC had then predicted, and the discrepancy is indeed significant in that the actual rate of warming falls outwith the measurement uncertainties specified in the IPCC’s 1990 prediction.”

So, in your posting, when you were talking about the “discrepancy” between predictions published by the IPCC and observed data, like when you said, “now acutely embarrassing, discrepancy between predicted and observed long-term warming rates”, were you merely talking about the IPCC Report from the year 1990? Really? Is this how you want to sell now your statement from your posting to which I replied? That the observed temperature record was in contradiction to projections that were done about 25 years ago, with early climate models, which still were relatively simple? And this was “embarrassing” for the IPCC? There have been three more IPCC Reports since the first one. The projections for the long-term global temperature rise due to greenhouse gases, given in the IPCC Report 1990, were not even based on fully dynamic coupled ocean-atmosphere models. The given estimates in the report came with severe caveats. The models and the modeling capabilities have developed a lot since then.

But, OK. Let’s talk about those early projections. For instance as summarized in the Executive Summary of Chapter 6, “Time-Dependent Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change”, on page 178 of the IPCC Report 1990. There, following projections can be found:

The trend since 1990 has been about 0.15 K/decade. That makes about about 0.3 K, halfway to the year 2030. Assuming the trend linearly continued, this would make about 0.6 K in 2030. So, the real world temperature change would be about 0.1 K below the lower bound of the estimate for the year 2030. Perhaps, the estimates 25 years ago were somewhat on the high side. So what? Do you have to offer anything that is based on a comparison between observed temperature and predictions from more recent publications of the IPCC?

“It appears that Perlwitz has willfully attempted to mislead readers with a series of outright falsehoods.”

Mr. Monckton, you must have a very strange understanding how such an accusation against a person can be substantiated with evidence, since your reply to my comment consisted of only a repetition of previous assertions by you to which I had replied, but which you have not backed up with anything. You seem to think that merely repeating your previous assertions was evidence enough. You have not shown any of my statements to be a “falsehood”. I have demonstrated that I can back up my statements about facts with references, though.

I also have demonstrated that following assertions or suggestions by you do not hold up to fact checking:

1. Your assertion that all of the major data sets for the tropospheric or surface temperature do not show a temperature rise for the recent 17 years.

2. Your suggestion that the land ice in Antarctica was not melting, that it even was accumulating.

With respect to the alleged discrepancy between temperature projections done with climate models and published in IPCC-Reports and observed temperatures, you have tried to weasel yourself out by now talking about projections in only the first IPCC-Report from the year 1990.

You have not backed up your assertion about the alleged discrepancy between the observed increase in the ocean heat anomaly and what has been predicted with models.

You have not backed up your assertion about the alleged statements in the NOAA State of the Climate Report 2008.

You have not given any explanation why a reasoning that is usually invalid in statistics is supposed to be valid for your conclusions you draw from the fact of a lack of statistical significance of the temperature trend for recent x years.

In two cases you have invented statements, I allegedly made, although I didn’t make these statements.

“If so, Perlwitz does no favors to the climate-extremist cause and should perhaps go and play trains somewhere else – with Engineer Pachauri, perhaps.”

My reply to this statement, with which you try to belittle me as a person is that you, Mr. Monckton, perhaps should do something in your profession instead, like tabloid writing about inconsequential stuff, but refrain from writing and pretending to be an expert regarding things you do not understand, like climate science or anything that has to do with statistics.

Pachuari and Monckton are in agreement that it has not warmed for 17 years. They are both mistaken.

Five global temperature data show a warming trend over the last 17 years. Due to the noise for short periods, there is some variation in the warming rate, although going back to 1960 all 5 data sets are in excellent agreement:

As I have pointed out, 17 year data sets are unreliable as arepresentation of the long term trends. Moncktom suggests we should look back 60 years or so.

The following is a graph of Hadcrut4 temperatures from 1945 to the present. The long term warming trend is

0.094 ±0.019 °C/decade (2σ)

Breaking that period up into four 17 year periods shows just how unreliable a 17 year period is as a representative of the long term trend, but by chance, the last 17 years are in excellent agreement with the long term trend.

“And exactly this conclusion drawn by Monckton and, as is seems, by “skeptics” in general is not scientifically valid, when it is based on a lack of statistical significance of the trend estimate. A failure to reject the Null-hypothesis (Zero-trend) for a given probability threshold does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (presence of a trend), since it cannot be excluded the possibility that this lack of statistical significance is just coming from fluctuations in the limited data set, which are masking the trend that can be seen in the extended time series. Non-detectability of a trend is not the same as absence of a trend.”

Jan Perlwitz is mistaken. When the trend is expected and has been identified with attribution already, said to be clearly standing out, and then that trend disappears, it does mean abscence of trend.

It’s not as if the situation were a person listening for a special worm fart from 1000 miles away, Jan. Remember, they even had the anthro signal firmly by the throat.

This shows the declining temperature trend overlaid with the rising CO2 concentration, confirming that CO2 causes no measurable global warming. At this point, only religious True Believers believe the discredited and debunked CO2=CAGW nonsense.

Satellite data is the most accurate global temperature data, and it confirms what Pachauri, Trenberth, Hansen, Monckton, and what every honest commentator are now saying.

Even arch-alarmist Phil Jones shows that the periodic temperature rises, as the planet naturally recovers from the Little Ice Age, have nothing to do with CO2. Note that the step rises were exactly the same, whether CO2 was low, or high, proving that any effect from CO2 is too small to measure. Here is another view from a different start date, to show that these charts are not cherry-picks.

Here we have a 30-year chart from another data source, to avoid Shehan-style cherry-picking. Note that the trend changed about 17 years ago. By cherry-picking start dates, it can be decptively claimed that global warming is continuing. Bu looking closer, we see that we’ve gone over the hump. More importantly, we see that CO2 has no measurable effect on temperature — the central claim of the climate alarmist contingent. Their claim has been shown to be flat wrong.

In fact, there was coincidental correlation between CO2 and temperature only from around 1980 to 1997. And at all times, changes in CO2 followed changes in temperature. Thus, ∆T causes ∆CO2, not vice-versa, on all time scales, from months to hundreds of millennia.

I have dozens of similar charts, all of them showing that the “carbon” scare is debunked nonsense. Even Hansen and Pachauri now admit that global warming has stalled, and only cognitive dissonant-afflicted True Believers try to convince folks otherwise.

A “troll” according to the definition by Monckton is: Anyone who dares to contradict his drivel.
========================================
Thanks for the condensed version of your screed.
It really saved time.

Yes. It’s absurd conspiracy fantasy nonsense. But I understand why many (most?) “skeptics” are delving into the conspiracy fantasy crap. How else do you reconcile that your belief system is in full contradiction to a whole body of research in a scientific field? There must be some omnipotent global conspiracy of sinister forces behind it, who is controlling the whole field of science, involving thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, who agree with the paradigm of anthropogenically caused global warming, also generally the scientific academies all over the world, as well as the editorial boards of the international scientific specialist publications in the field. All controlled by some central cabal. And that this vast conspiracy still hasn’t blown up after several decades of promoting the “AGW hoax”, that there haven’t been any whistle blowers yet gone public of those people who have been involved in the conspiracy, only proves how powerful this conspiracy is. Every whistle blower has probably been vanished without any trace. All records about their existence erased.

Yes. It’s absurd conspiracy fantasy nonsense. But I understand why many (most?) “skeptics” are delving into the conspiracy fantasy crap. How else do you reconcile that your belief system is in full contradiction to a whole body of research in a scientific field? There must be some omnipotent global conspiracy of sinister forces behind it, who is controlling the whole field of science, involving thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, who agree with the paradigm of anthropogenically caused global warming, also generally the scientific academies all over the world, as well as the editorial boards of the international scientific specialist publications in the field. All controlled by some central cabal. And that this vast conspiracy still hasn’t blown up after several decades of promoting the “AGW hoax”, that there haven’t been any whistle blowers yet gone public of those people who have been involved in the conspiracy, only proves how powerful this conspiracy is. Every whistle blower has probably been vanished without any trace. All records about their existence erased.

– – – – – – – – – – –

Jan P Perlwitz,

Thanks for your comment / opinion.

No conspiracy at all.

The obvious and publically known migration (intellectually or physically) of individuals toward their perception of a leadership nexus of their ideology is not conspiracy. People supporting the central non-scientific tenants that the IPCC was founded explicitly on have openly migrated toward the IPCC. People openly migrate toward the NGOs that clearly have a very dominate influence on the IPCC directorate. People openly migrate toward the media who are initiating and maintaining a public crusade on the subject of alarming AGW from CO2. Where is a conspiracy in that? Those are open and publically discussed ideological movements, not conspiracies.

I have no problem with their migrations or ideologies except where they are trying to openly and publically use force to make me live by the dictates of their ideologies. My resistance will never be futile.

WRT alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2, your claim of support by ‘a whole body of research in a scientific field’ is actually the support of a limited partial body of research in the boarder whole field. The broader field does not support alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2, the problematic assessments of the IPCC to the contrary notwithstanding.

That the 17 year period lacks statistical significance within the 95% confidence limit is due to that fact that the noise over the short periods swamps the signal. As it does for every consecutive 17 year period since 1945, except for the period 1979 to 1996 and then only to the third decimal point.

Monckton himself says that long term time periods should be looked at, and wants to examine data back to 1950.

So you can look at the data from 1945 chopped into consecutive 17 year bits and claim the data tell you nothing whatever temperature has been doing since then because the noise over each of those periods swamps the signal, or you can do the mathematically correct thing and look at the entire data set.

Those who have suddenly discovered statistical significance are ignoring the first rule of statistics. You must have a large enough sample size to say anything meaningful.

And statistical significance cuts both ways. If the last 17 years says that there is no frquentist “statistically significant” evidence for warming, there is no statistically significant evidence that warming has stalled, or is any different from the longer term trend. That is the real “null hypothesis”.That there has been no change in the last 17 years.

Furthermore, what is called “frequentist or “Fisherian” statistical significance is a very high bar scientists set themselves.

It means that there must be a 95% chance or better that the trend is real. A trend of 94.9% is not “statistically significant” but most people would think a 94% or 90% chance of an occurrence is a pretty high level of probability.

In fact frequentist statistics is not the only game in town, and in the last decade many scientists on a number of fields have been moving towards what they consider a more realistic and useful statistical approach – Bayesian statistics. This is particularly useful in that the probability of a particular event is informed by prior knowledge of the system.

We can estimate the warming probability for the last 17 years from the fact that the statistically significant range for the Hadcrut4 data is

0.091 ±0.120 °C/decade

That is, there is a 95% probability that the real trend is between 0.211 and -.029 °C/decade,

So 88% of that range lies on the warming side of the ledger. Or an 88% chance that the true trend is for warming.

Now, 88% is a pretty high probability even as it stands.

Given that the trend for the last half century prior to or up to and including the last 17 years show a warming trend at the frequentist level of significance, a Bayesian analysis of the data would put the probability of warming even higher.

The following is a graph of Hadcrut4 temperatures from 1945 to the present. The long term warming trend is
0.094 ±0.019 °C/decade (2σ)
Since we have gone up 0.8 C since 1750, and since it is apparently dangerous for us to go up 2 C, at 0.094/decade, it would take another 128 years to reach the 2 C. (I do not believe 2 C would be dangerous, but that is a different discussion.) I just cannot figure out why governments should spend billions on things like carbon capture. For all we know, we could be in an ice age by that time! Until the sun comes out of its huge slump, I would not be worried about CO2.

Mr Stealey. It was you who put up a graph of raw Muana Loa data superimposed on raw temperature data.

I responded by doing the same thing, but for a longer time period.

So if my plot is a fabrication I was only following your lead.

The overlay of the data is a correlation. It could be converted into a direct concentration vs temperature plot by factoring out the common time scale. And note that I never claimed a correlation implied causation. So it would not matter which parameter you put on the vertical axis.

Your latest comment posts a graph using the WFT isolate function, which removes the long term trend and leaves the “noise”

The sawtooth pattern in the raw Muana Loa data is due to the seasonal variation in the northern hemisphere which has a far greater land area and deciduous forests. During the warm seasons the plants grow and take CPO2 from the atmosphere. In the winter months CO2 uptake is greatly reduced and CO2 added to the atmosphere by the decay of autumn leaves (and by people burning fuel for warmth.)

when I see global averaged temperatures compared to trends, it is always to 30-years periods
there is probably a reason, that short time 5, 10, 15 years trends are being avoided by science and professional climatologist

@ D.B. Stealey February 23, 2013 at 7:04 am
I was not discussing sea ice extent, I was critisizing Monckton who let this Graham Lloyd garbage pass: “this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth”
for your information there was a record MINIMUM arctic sea ice extent (and volume)
lets be carefull in what we write;

“People supporting the central non-scientific tenants that the IPCC was founded explicitly on have openly migrated toward the IPCC.”

About whom are you talking, specifically? What about some names and addresses? And what exactly do those people do? What is this statement, “migrated toward the IPCC”, even supposed to mean?

“People openly migrate toward the NGOs that clearly have a very dominate influence on the IPCC directorate.”

Again, who are the ones specifically with the “clearly dominate” influence? And what does the “IPCC directorate” do? For instance, who are the ones who write the IPCC Report published every six years? The “IPCC directorate”?

“Those are open and publically discussed ideological movements, not conspiracies.”

So, now it’s suddenly all “open and publically discussed”, according to you. Well, in contrast, in your previous comment you asserted that there were “ideological creators / organizers” who were driven by a “hidden” motivation and who were basically financing and controlling climate science, people who were as omnipotent that there were able to suppress a “significant bulk of science research” that was in contradiction to the “IPCC position”. If this is not a belief in an omnipotent, global conspiracy of a cabal behind behind the alleged “AGW swindle/hoax/scam” or whatever you “skeptics” call it, what else is it? This cabal must be controlling of not just the IPCC body itself and the some hundreds of scientists who are writing the IPCC report, also of the relevant scientific academies all over the world, of the editorial boards of all the specialist journals in the field. How else could one prevent a “significant bulk of science research” to be published, which allegedly was in contradiction to the IPCC position? How else could one make certain that thousands of scientists from all over the world have participated in the forging of data and manipulating the results from research in the peer reviewed journals of the field for decades to forge evidence to support the “AGW scare”?

WRT alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2, your claim of support by ‘a whole body of research in a scientific field’ is actually the support of a limited partial body of research in the boarder whole field. The broader field does not support alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2, the problematic assessments of the IPCC to the contrary notwithstanding.

What exactly do you mean with “broader whole field”? I am talking about the ones who actually work and publish in the field of climate science. As someone who works in the field too, I think I would have noticed if the majority of the climate scientists did not agree with the statements that there has been global warming since pre-industrial times, the global warming in the recent 40 years or so can be attributed mostly to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, and that the global warming is very likely to continue in the current and following centuries, if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase due to human activity. This does not mean that everyone agrees on every aspect, though. So, if you say my perception about this was wrong, where can I find all those many climate scientists who do not agree with those central statements, which, I think, have even reached the status of a paradigm in climate science?

Yes. It’s absurd conspiracy fantasy nonsense. But I understand why many (most?) “skeptics” are delving into the conspiracy fantasy crap. How else do you reconcile that your belief system is in full contradiction to a whole body of research in a scientific field? There must be some omnipotent global conspiracy of sinister forces behind it, who is controlling the whole field of science, involving thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, who agree with the paradigm of anthropogenically caused global warming, also generally the scientific academies all over the world, as well as the editorial boards of the international scientific specialist publications in the field. All controlled by some central cabal. And that this vast conspiracy still hasn’t blown up after several decades of promoting the “AGW hoax”, that there haven’t been any whistle blowers yet gone public of those people who have been involved in the conspiracy, only proves how powerful this conspiracy is. Every whistle blower has probably been vanished without any trace. All records about their existence erased.
———————————–
Bravo Jan! That’s one of the biggest straw men I’ve ever seen.

“The overlay of the data is a correlation. It could be converted into a direct concentration vs temperature plot by factoring out the common time scale.”

Wrong, as usual. It is simply an overlay. The correlation is in the fact that ∆T causes ∆CO2. I provided a graph showing that direct correlation. I can provide more graphs showing the same correlation. So I challenge you to provide a similar graph of your own, but showing that changes in CO2 cause changes in temperature. The overlay you ginned up is a simple fabrication. It does not show cause and effect. Mine does.

If you can produce a chart showing that ∆CO2 causes ∆T, it will be the first I have seen, and I have many thousands of charts and graphs. But if you cannot produce the same kind of chart, showing that CO2 causes changes in T, then you lose the argument.

In fact, you have already lost the argument many times over, starting with your absurd claim that global temperatures are accelerating, when in fact, global warming has stalled.

[ . . . ] How else could one make certain that thousands of scientists from all over the world have participated in the forging of data and manipulating the results from research in the peer reviewed journals of the field for decades to forge evidence to support the “AGW scare”?

[ . . . ]

So, if you say my perception about this was wrong, where can I find all those many climate scientists who do not agree with those central statements, which, I think, have even reached the status of a paradigm in climate science?

– – – – – – – –

Jan P Perlwitz,

Hey, I enjoy your replies as I think it is exciting that we can have the opportunity to attempt to drill past perceptions to some fundamental premises.

Per your points in both the quotes above, I respond that the IPCC must be by logic scientifically flawed due to the anthropogenically myopic framework that established it. And it is structurally incapable of scientifically separating itself from the influence of its ideological leadership. Plus, prima fascia it has not produced assessments that consistently agree with the actual present climate much less agree significantly with historical behavior of natural phenomena.

The scientists involved in IPCC assessment decision making can and do speak for themselves when not muzzled by the IPCC’s opaque processes; their arguments with critics of the IPCC can stand or fall per the very significant level of ongoing debate. That very broad and balanced dialog is much more scientifically appropriate than the problematic IPCC; the broader dialog has effectively bypassed the role of the IPCC. We already have the new paradigm on climate science synthesis, it is starkly open and transparent relative to the IPCC. {Jan, i think you are an important part of the new paradigm and I personally and sincerely thank you for participating.}

An objective indicator of the paradigm shift is scientists do not labor away in an closed forum. They can pick their professional options in the new paradigm. I think we are seeing growth of research unrestricted by the old paradigm (IPCC). Great news for science and the professional advancement of the more enterprising of the scientists.

Again I ask if the IPCC house’s necessary bottom foundational tier, the media, is dissolving and starting on another more plausible crusade? I do not know.

Take care. Hey, I presume you are in NYC, I will be NYC occasionally in May (I am spending May at my family’s rustic lakehouse in the Adirondacks) so we can perhaps cordially interact over a drink? I would enjoy that.

“In fact, you have already lost the argument many times over, starting with your absurd claim that global temperatures are accelerating, when in fact, global warming has stalled.”
D.B. Stealey,

there are several things wrong with the graph you are presenting here:

a. why not some extra years before 1997 / 1998?
b. why not begin the graph with the 0,2 C from january 1997?
c. where are the “some thenths of a degree below 14C world average mentioned in the head of the figure?

1. Arctic ice cover is cyclical. The Arctic has been completely ice-free in the geologic past.

2. Increasing Antarctic ice falsifies the alarmist claim that CO2 is the cause of Arctic ice decline, because CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere, and it affects the Antarctic as well.

3. If Arctic ice cover should completely melt, there are clear benefits, including shorter transit times, and major fuel savings. There is no harm from an ice-free Arctic.

The climate alarmist crowd has grabbed hold of the declining Arctic ice narrative like a drowning man grabs a stick. However, the original prediction was that CO2 would cause global warming, which would melt both polar ice caps. Their prediction, like every other alarmist prediction, was wrong.

Thinking people understand that a minuscule 0.8ºC rise in global temperature over a century and a half cannot cause the polar ice caps to melt. On average most of the Arctic is well below 0ºC. Rather, it is changing winds, currents, and the appearance of a major storm that caused the current low Arctic ice cycle.

Between 6,000 – 7,000 years ago the Arctic was ice free. At that time CO2 was very low. And the planet has been much warmer than that, earlier in its history. We are currently in an Ice Age. In a Hothouse Earth, there is no polar ice. The planet’s temperature now is about 14ºC. It has been ten degrees warmer in the geologic past — when the biosphere teemed with life and diversity.

If your position is that Arctic ice cover is cyclical and natural, then we are in agreement. But if you are one of those who tries to blame declining Arctic ice on human CO2 emissions, then it is easy to show that you are promoting a false conjecture. Because there is no testable scientific evidence showing that CO2 is the cause of the current Arctic ice cycle.

First off, the chart I linked to was not my construction, so complaining about the start date won’t change it. But here you can see the current trend, which is not rising.

And here is a chart of the entire satellite era. Note the trend over the past decade.

Here is a chart from 1995 [per your request, but I do not expect this to satisfy you; your mind is already made up on the subject].

Here is a chart showing flat temperatures during the past decade. Note the steadily rising CO2, which is doing nothing to raise temperatures.

Here is a chart showing that there has been no accelerated warming, despite a sharp rise in CO2. That effectively deconstructs the repeatedly debunked CO2=AGW narrative.

Finally, here is a comparison of human versus natural CO2 emissions. And China’s CO2 emissions are skyrocketing, while the U.S. emissions are declining. Question: are you writing as many blog posts criticizing China? And Russia, and India, and a hundred smaller countries? Or does everyone except the U.S. get a free pass?

Shehan @February 24, 2013 at 9:31 pm asserts that “there is a 95% probability that the real trend is between 0.091 ±0.120 °C/decade”. What orifice did he or his pals pull that bogus number from? From SkS? If so, it figures. That number would indicate a +3ºC global warming since the LIA. That is far higher than even Phil Jones estimates.

The fact is that natural global warming has been only ≈0.35ºC/century since the end of the Little Ice Age:

There is no verifiable, falsifiable AGW ‘signal’ in the data. AGW is only a conjecture. It may cause some minor warming if it exists, but there is currently no empirical, testable measurement of AGW. If there were, then the arguments over the climate sensitivity number would be settled. [As it is, credible scientists argue that CO2 causes a net cooling; or that 2xCO2 causes 0.0ºC warming, or that 2xCO2 causes <0.5º warming, or ≈1º, or even up to 3º+ warming.]

Those falsely asserting that "carbon" is causing runaway global warming are either cherry-picking from unreliable sources, or they are lying propaganda-bots. I cannot see any third alternative.

The following is a graph of Hadcrut4 temperatures from 1945 to the present. The long term warming trend is

0.094 ±0.019 °C/decade (2σ)

Breaking that period up into four 17 year periods shows just how unreliable a 17 year period is as a representative of the long term trend, but by chance, the last 17 years are in excellent agreement with the long term trend.

That the 17 year period lacks statistical significance within the 95% confidence limit is due to that fact that the noise over the short periods swamps the signal. As it does for every consecutive 17 year period since 1945, except for the period 1979 to 1996 and then only to the third decimal point.

Monckton himself says that long term time periods should be looked at, and wants to examine data back to 1950.

So you can look at the data from 1945 chopped into consecutive 17 year bits and claim the data tell you nothing whatever temperature has been doing since then because the noise over each of those periods swamps the signal, or you can do the mathematically correct thing and look at the entire data set.

Now, looking at the longest reliable temperature trend, we see that whether CO2 was low or high, it makes no difference to global warming. The long term trend [the decelerating green line] is certainly not accelerating — which it would be doing IF CO2 had the claimed effect.

That fact deconstructs the AGW conjecture. Remember that without testable, empirical, verifiable measurements, AGW is only a conjecture at this point. If AGW exists, it is a minor, 3rd order forcing, which is easily swamped by many other forcings, both 1st order and 2nd order.

The more real world data that is collected, the less any putative warming effect of CO2 is found. CO2 just doesn’t matter. Pachauri can see this, even if you can’t.

you come with a lot of remarks and new questions while I was only asking and complaining about the headline ” No warming for 17 years” and the graph that came with it;

during this periode we had ten of the top ten warmest years, so NO warming is a wrong statement;
in september 2013 we will be the start of 17th year, not earlier;
so the headline is double wrong;

that translates into the figure or vv, whatever you like;

that figure promises something there is not: tenths of a degree BELOW world average;

these are all mistakes David Rose introduced in october 2012 in his article in the Mail Online, but Peiser / Whitehouse, Morano and Monckton (and others) just go on promoting this nonsens and figure;

I did’nt know the arctic cover was cyclical in recent times, but I do believe that the melting now has something to do with higher average temperatures and polar amplification;

that it can go fast you can see with your own eyes when spring returns and all snow melts;

besides that, I was not arguing about sea ice, I was complaining about a sentence that passed Monckons ‘scrutiny’ while copy pasting the article from the Australian: ” that included this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth” – which in my opinion is just completely wrong;

I am not specialy against the US, there is enough to complain about in my own country, but I could agree with you if you state that all industrialised countries are contributing to rising CO2-levels, including the US and China;

The following is a graph of Hadcrut4 temperatures from 1945 to the present. The long term warming trend is
0.094 ±0.019 °C/decade (2σ)
Since we have gone up 0.8 C since 1750, and since it is apparently dangerous for us to go up 2 C, at 0.094/decade, it would take another 128 years to reach the 2 C.”

Werner, you are making a fundamental erroneous assumption that global temperature is a linear function of time. The long and very long term (geologic data) clearly show it is not.

The question of AGW covers the period from the when large scale industrialization began to significantly add to atmospheric CO2 levels, that is from about the middle of the 19th century.

When examining multidecadel temperature trends during that period, linear functions are routinely fitted, as the noise level in the data precludes the fitting of any more complex function. The linear fits are acceptable approximations giving multidecadel trends.

However over a period of 162 years, this approximation clearly breaks down. The temperature data for the earliest and latest part of the plot are above the linear trend line, and the linear fits of the first 82 and second 82 years have distinctly different slopes.

@ db stealey
Because there is no testable scientific evidence showing that CO2 is the cause of the current Arctic ice cycle.

I just did read an article by Wielaw Maslowski (The Future of Arctic Sea Ice Feb 2012) in which he argue that 1/3 of arctic sea ice declina is wind and current driven, but 2/3 is caused by melting from underneath (water) and from the air;

A lot of the comments back and forth show that many people are confused about the “pause in warming” over the last 17 years. The Hadcrut4 data is “not inconsistent” with a 0 °C/decade trend. But I can also state, with the same level of accuracy (or misdirection, or imprecision) that the Hadcrut4 data of the last 17 years is not inconsistent with a trend of 0.182 °C/decade

The “pause in warming” can also be legitimately described (using the same logic as for the “pause”) as showing “a continued warming trend of 0.182 °C/decade” over the last 17 years.

How can the same data record support statements that the warming trend is 0 °C/decade and 0.18 °C/decade per decade ???

Easy.

Using the Hadcrut4 data for 1996 through 2012 we get a linear trend line of 0.091 ±0.120 °C/decade. (Yes, I know the error band is underestimated because of the statistical nature of the data, but that doesn’t affect my main point.)

Looking back at the last 17 years, a trend of 0 °C/decade is 0.091 °C/decade less than the best estimate of the observations. Yes, since the trend is 0.091 plus/minus 0.120 C/decade, so the zero trend is not rejected; or in other words, the observed trend is not statistically significantly different than 0 °C/decade.

On the other hand, it would be equally valid to say that an assumed trend of 0.182 °C/decade is only 0.091 °C/decade greater than the observed trend of 0.091 °C/decade. Indeed, I have chosen 0.182 °C/decade for my example because is is the same amount above the observed trend, as a zero trend is below the observed trend.

Therefore, I can claim, with the same level of accuracy (or misdirection, or imprecision) that the Hadcrut4 data of the last 17 years shows a trend of 0.182 °C/decade

“I could agree with you if you state that all industrialised countries are contributing to rising CO2-levels, including the US and China”.

Yes, I can state that all industrialized countries are contributing to rising CO2 levels. I am glad you agree with me, because my central point is that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. At current and projected concentrations, more CO2 is better. There is no downside.

I also know that rising CO2 is largely a result of global warming; not a cause.

• • •

Mr Shehan,

Please stop linking to that SkS chart with the phony red line. It has no provenance, and it was obviously fabricated to show a fictional acceleration in global warming. The chart I posted is based on widely accepted empirical observations, and it contradicts that fictional SkS chart showing geometrically accelerating temperatures. The chart I posted has an auto-generated [green] trend line, which is straight and decelerating. So enough with the fake alarmist propaganda.

Here is another chart that shows [natural] global warming within specific parameters. Note that those parameters are not exceeded, which would be required if warming was actually accelerating. That chart is constructed using verifiable data. The data source is listed.

Global warming has stalled because CO2 has little if any effect. Who should people believe? You? Or their lying eyes, and Planet Earth? AGW is a narrative; an assertion. There are no testable AGW measurements. That is why you cannot produce a chart that shows ∆CO2 causing ∆temperature. You have cause and effect reversed, so naturally your conclusions are wrong.

Werner, you are making a fundamental erroneous assumption that global temperature is a linear function of time.

The temperature data is much better fitted by a nonlinear function

Neither the linear function nor your steadily rising curve are accurate portrayals of what is really happening in my opinion. The steadily rising curve makes it look like global warming is accelerating and it clearly is not. Phil Jones, Hansen and Pachauri all agree on this point at least. The most accurate shape is a a sine wave that has a slow rise as shown here:

The only widely accepted empirical empirical observations on this chart are the red line representing the Hadcrut3 variance adjusted global mean temperatures.

The green line I have left in place and the other lines I have removed are not “empirical observations”. And they are not “auto generated”. The green line shows the results of a linear fit to the empirical temperature data (the red line) that you have chosen to apply.

A linear fit is the simplest that can be applied to the data, and this is the only option WFT supplies, but it is an approximation. There is absolutely no theoretical reason whatsoever for the assumption that global temperatures increase linearly with time and you yourself have in the past posted very long term temperature data that demonstrates this fact. The linear approximation is useful for a discussion of short term trends of a few decades only.

Note also that the green line is not “decelerating”. By definition it is dead straight. Linear. It is the best fit a linear function can apply to the red data.

What the simplified chart shows however, is that from 1850 to about 1885, the red empirical data is almost all above the green line. As is the data after about 1990. Except for the local peak around 1940, the empirical between 1885 and 1990 is mostly below the line. This indicates that there is a curve in the underlying trend, concave to the top of the chart and that the linear fit is failing to show what is really happening.

The data in the SkS chart is every bit as empirical as the red line in your chart and the “provenance” every bit as good. It was produced by Robert Way who writes:

“Each temperature dataset has their own individual caveats so it is difficult to assess which is the most reliable, but a purely unscientific way to look at this issue is to put all the datasets on the same baseline and to average them to create the All Method Temperature Index (AMTI). I have put all the Table 1 datasets on the 1990-2000 baseline (so we could include all) and have averaged them…”

The data sets are these (rate of warming for given indices in °C/century.):

Instead of choosing to fit the data to a straight line, Mr Way has applied a nonlinear curve fit represented by the red line. Again this is not data but a fit to the data in the same way that the green line is in your chart. The only complaint I have about the Mr Way’s analysis is that he has neglected to tell us what the actual function is but is probably a third order polynomial, similar to the one Layman Lurker posted some time back. Way has supplied the regression coefficient for the fit r2 which is a very respectable 0.8412.

Werner has suggested that a nonlinear function (an upwardly sloping sinewave) can account for the temperature data, and this would seem to help explain the local peak around 1940, but when choosing a curve to fit the data, there is a temptation to go too far and use a too complicated function which ends up fitting noise or other artifacts. Werner has not supplied a theoretical justification for the sinewave. On the basis of greater simplicity and the theoretical backing of the match with the rise in CO2 concentration curve for the period, I think the Way’s fit is to be preferred.

I am surprised you object to my drawing attention to the similarity of the CO2 and temperature curves, since you have posted a number of charts showing such a relationship yourself. Of course, you wish to claim that CO2 follows temperature, whereas in this case the upswing in temperature lags behind the CO2 increase…

As far as I know, the sine wave has a lot to do with the PDO. However we do know that the effect of added CO2 follows the law of diminishing returns. And the sine wave with the resultant pause over the last 12 to 16 years is consistent with the logarithmic effect of added CO2. Even the IPCC agrees with this. However your accelerating line is not consistent with this logarithmic effect.

Werner, I am aware of the logaritmic efffect of CO2, but it depends on where you are on the curve. In the early part the curve can “accelerate” especially if CO2 concentration is rising exponentially, and then plateau giving an elongated “S” shape.

I do have some experience with logarithmic functions, as I spent my PhD thesis analysing such curves which are characteristic of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance relaxation times.

Mr Stealey, With all due respect to Werner, this “appeal to authority” is a little thin. And the fact that someone may dispute an analysis is not the same as saying it is “bogus”. You have never been able to justify that claim other than with the idiotic remarks that it is reproduced on a website you don’t like. It is neither lacking in “provenance” nor “hand drawn” nor by John Cook as you have previously claimed.

That you are not prepared to read an argument (Or claim that you haven’t. You seem toi have got as far as my remarks regarding Werner’s analysis) that runs counter to your prejudices surprises me not at all.

You did not comment ont my remarks about Kinnard and Maslowski, nor did you reply to my conclusions about the use of the in my opinion fraudulous graph of David Rose by Mr Monckton;
We seem to have a different attitude towards integrity in science and in blogging about science;
Martin van Etten
Amsterdam / The Netherlands
PS: CO2 can be harmfull when it leads to higher temperatures an and higher sea levels

“I agree. That is why I like taking the longest time that the slope is 0. For Hadcrut4, that happens to be from November 2000 or 12 years and 2 months going to December.”

I want to make sure that I understand you correctly. The purpose of your exercise is to present something that does not allow any conclusion regarding the question whether the trend has become Zero in recent years or still is the same as the one estimated over a time-period of multiple decades, which has been statistically significant with 3 to 4 sigma?

What for? To study the properties of the noise in the temperature series on short time intervals, before the signal becomes statistically significant?

Anthony Watts replied with respect to some obscure graph, after he was asked for a reference:

“I predict you’ll accept none of it though. – Anthony”

You can extend this prediction to me, Mr. Watts. And your prediction will be correct. The graph is referenced with a link to an opinion article, which references to another opinion article (written by someone who claimed on some Heartland bogus “climate conference” that the globally averaged Earth near surface temperature decreased by 0.6 Kelvin from 1998 to 2008, and is nevertheless be taken seriously by the “skeptic” crowd.). And all on your blog. Some reliable scientific references! Why should anyone who actually works in the field even bother with this kind of “references”?

Where does this formula “4.7ln(CO2) – 26.9” come from, which has the annotation “Global Warming Models”? Why is this formula annotated in this way? What are these obscure “Global Warming Models” in the figure?

Mr. Perlwitz, if you’d bothered to read the links I provided above, you would find the source files. But since once again you’ve reached a conclusion prior to reading it all and started bloviating about Heartland, proving your hate precedes your logic, I’ll point you to the source files here:

As far as “reliable scientific references” and “all on your blog” go, I could say the same thing about your boss James Hansen, each time he publishes one of his non peer reviewed manifestos on his personal web page citing his own previous work.

Also note that the IPCC has a reference to logarithmic CO2 effects:

Equilibrium GCM 2 x CO2 experiments commonly assume a radiative forcing equivalent to a doubling of CO2 concentration (for example from 300 ppmv to 600 ppmv). In fact the absolute concentrations are not especially important, as the temperature response to increasing CO2 concentration is logarithmic – a doubling from 500 to 1000 ppmv would have approximately the same climatic effect.

there is no deeper meaning, there is only the question:
were can I find the temperature of the last glacial maximum?
could you please explain how to read that in the graph;

it must be my terrible English, but it seemed obvious to me that it would be clear to you that I was referring to the graph, two or three paragraphs above my question, about the logarithmic relationship;

there you have marked 280 ppm, 350 ppm, 388 ppm and doubling what seems to be 560 (= 2 x 280)

those points of ‘passage’ I can understand, so I have only one question left: what temperature related to how much CO2 during the last glacial maximum?

REPLY: That isn’t my reply, but the reply of one of my moderators. See comment below this – Anthony

Shehan: “The following is a graph of Hadcrut4 temperatures from 1945 to the present. The long term warming trend is

0.094 ±0.019 °C/decade (2σ)”

You consider that “long term”?? Let’s go back 1000 years, 2000, 5000. Oh, right, we can’t with any accuracy. Which means we DON’T KNOW if modern temperatures are unprecedented either in scale or rate of change.

The whole CAGW scare is tantamount to opening the window one morning, seeing it’s raining, and proclaiming a global flood is about to occur, based on the trend taken of a tiny snapshot in time.

there is no deeper meaning, there is only the question:
were can I find the temperature of the last glacial maximum?
could you please explain how to read that in the graph;

You can’t find such a thing. You can find estimations based on proxies, but I’m not convinced of any claimed accuracy from those. Add in the fact that there is no “global temperature”, anything claimed to be derived from such (average, mean, anomaly, etc) is a complete fantasy.

“Mr. Perlwitz, if you’d bothered to read the links I provided above, you would find the source files. But since once again you’ve reached a conclusion prior to reading it all and started bloviating about Heartland, proving your hate precedes your logic,”

You have not proven anything, you are just asserting. I did click through the links. And no, I didn’t find any scientific reference for the figure you have shown here. And this link, which one also could find from one of the other opinion articles,

is just another opinion article on your blog again, written by someone named Bill Illis (never heard about him before). This article contains a somewhat modified version of the graphic you presented, but still no scientific reference for it.

“As far as “reliable scientific references” and “all on your blog” go, I could say the same thing about your boss James Hansen, each time he publishes one of his non peer reviewed manifestos on his personal web page citing his own previous work.”

Of course you could. Hansen’s non-peer-reviewed elaboration on his own blog are opinion articles, nothing else. The scientific references he uses are not mere opinion articles, though.

Since I do not recall to have presented any of Hansens’s opinions he lays out in his blog as scientific references, what was the purpose of your tu quoque argument?

“Show me also where “Heartland” appears in that story or source files.”

Despite being unsatisfied if I only get provided links to opinion articles, which present something without any references, as if an assertion could be backed up with something where someone else merely makes the same assertion, I even more question the reliability of the elaborations by someone (Archibald) whose opinion is presented as reference, but who makes such blatantly false claims on an alleged “climate conference”, where not even anyone seems to mind.

“Also note that the IPCC has a reference to logarithmic CO2 effects: “

I did not question the logarithmic relationship between CO2 change and temperature change. I know it is logarithmic. I asked where the formula “4.7ln(CO2) – 26.9” in the graphic comes from and why it is annotated with “Global Warming Models”. At some other place in the same graphic it is described as “Warming Model Formula”. Why is that?

Does everybody know why our very own Railroader, Dr Pachauri is going quiet on CAGW? It’s because there’s an election in Australia later on this year! We are very important to his and his Organisation’s plans for World Domination!! We must elect his friend, Miss Juliar Gillard, to the top job again so that she can make more debt for us to pay back and waste it on “combating” Global (non-existent) Climate Change. Well, we’ll see who’s laughing after the end of the Election! I think the People shall make her very sorry for the lies she has told.

The Liberal Party is not too bad but they’ve been hoodwinked by this as well. Anything though to S.T.S.(silence the Socialists). @Graham W, we will all die of course but they want to accelerate it. We who are reasonable should clamor from the rooftops that these Mongrel Dogs should not be believed but how long will that work for? No doubt our children are being brainwashed into being good little obedient automaton’s and believe what the Teacher say’s. There will be blood in the streets when this finally comes to a head. HFTC.

“Add in the fact that there is no “global temperature”, anything claimed to be derived from such (average, mean, anomaly, etc) is a complete fantasy.”

Why would that be a “fantasy”? Because you postulate it was? The globally averaged temperature, e.g., near surface, or of the troposphere, is a very useful statistical metric to approximately diagnose the thermodynamic state of the component for which this metric is applied.

My purposes are at least two fold. I think it is fairer to say a slope is 0 than to say a slope could be 0 at a certain level of significance, but that it could also be much higher at the higher end.

But secondly, by stating when a slope is 0, I can say if the models are good according to NOAA.

PDF document @NOAA.gov. For anyone else who wants it, the exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

So I admit that Hadcrut4 does NOT meet this criteria yet, but three other data sets do. See the bolded ones below.

1. For GISS, the slope is flat since March 2001 or 11 years, 10 months. (goes to December)2. For Hadcrut3, the slope is flat since March 1997 or 15 years, 10 months. (goes to December)
3. For a combination of GISS, Hadcrut3, UAH and RSS, the slope is flat since December 2000 or an even 12 years. (goes to November)
4. For Hadcrut4, the slope is flat since November 2000 or 12 years, 2 months. (goes to December.)5. For Hadsst2, the slope is flat since March 1997 or 15 years, 10 months. (goes to December)
6. For UAH, the slope is flat since July 2008 or 4 years, 7 months. (goes to January)7. For RSS, the slope is flat since January 1997 or 16 years and 1 month.

@ Jeff Alberts says / February 26, 2013 at 7:34 am
in the post February 25, 2013 at 10:30 pm there are estimates ranging from – 0,4 for 280 ppm to 1.85 for doubling;
I am just asking from the specialists here to explain me the position of the Last Glacial Maximum in this graph, thats all ;

“CO2 can be harmfull when it leads to higher temperatures an and higher sea levels”

Ah. I see your problem. You believe the “carbon” propaganda. Let me help:

There is no empirical, testable evidence that CO2 causes global harm. None. That is a scientifically baseless assertion. No global harm has ever been directly connected to the rise in CO2. Therefore, CO2 is ‘harmless’.

Further, CO2 is beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. There are mountains of verifiable evidence proving that fact. Tens of thousands of professional scientists have explicitly stated in writing that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial.

Finally, the planet has been much warmer at times in the past. The current global temperature is about 14ºC. The planet has been ten degrees warmer, with no ill effects. During those warmer episodes the biosphere teemed with life and diversity. And at the same time, CO2 was much higher than now. Again, with no ill effects.

You have the choice of believing the pseudo-scientific nonsense asserted by self-serving alarmist propagandists — or you can use the scientific method to weed out their nonsense.

When there is zero scientific evidence for a claim, your best course of action is to ignore such claims. If I told you there was a black cat sitting under your bed, but you could find no evidence of it, would you still believe me? It’s the same thing with assertions of global harm due to CO2. There is zero testable scientific evidence of any global harm due to CO2, so why would you still believe such a story?

@ REPLY: That isn’t my reply, but the reply of one of my moderators. See comment below this – Anthony

I dont care who replies, I dont know you nor your moderator;
I just see an interesting graph and have a question;
are you for some reason avoiding the answer?
————————————————–
You mention difficulty with English in an earlier post, so perhaps this is an excusable misunderstanding. Unless I am badly mistaken, Anthony was explaining that you were in fact exchanging posts with one of his moderators, and your answer was:

Jeff Alberts says:
February 26, 2013 at 7:34 am

Martin van Etten says:
February 26, 2013 at 7:18 am

there is no deeper meaning, there is only the question:
were can I find the temperature of the last glacial maximum?
could you please explain how to read that in the graph;

You can’t find such a thing. You can find estimations based on proxies, but I’m not convinced of any claimed accuracy from those. Add in the fact that there is no “global temperature”, anything claimed to be derived from such (average, mean, anomaly, etc) is a complete fantasy.

Again, perhaps this is excusable due to the language barrier and difference in idiom, but I believe you ought to be aware that the query ‘are you for some reason avoiding the answer?’ is a somewhat rude way to phrase the question in English.

I suspect that van Etten would refuse to accept any answer given by Anthony, so it is probably a waste of time responding. Also, people tend to dislike being assigned homework.

A characteristic common to people like van Etten, Perlwitz, and Shehan is their refusal to accept reality. Their consternation comes from the fact that the planet is acting contrary to their alarmist narrative. They keep trying to explain it away, but we can see they are just blowing smoke.

At what point would any of them admit that their CO2=CAGW conjecture has been falsified? IMHO, they could never bring themselves to admit it under any circumstances. Religious belief is that strong.

At what point would any of them admit that their CO2=CAGW conjecture has been falsified? IMHO, they could never bring themselves to admit it under any circumstances. Religious belief is that strong.
————————————
Funny you should mention it. I was thinking this exactly earlier in reviewing Jan’s comments; religious conviction. When Werner Brozek actually does the math to critically examine the data, Jan’s comment is What for? To study the properties of the noise in the temperature series on short time intervals, before the signal becomes statistically significant?. Knowing perfectly well that the NOAA 2008 State of the Climate Report says in the middle of page 23 clear as day that an observed absence of warming of 15 yrs or more creates a discrepancy with the expected warming rate, all he can put forward is ‘this assertion by Monckton about such a statement in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008, which he uses to construct a contradiction between Pachauri’s alleged statement and this report, and to assert that the recent temperature record would indicate a discrepancy between “models and measured reality” is a (deliberate?) falsehood. There is no such statement made in the NOAA Report. What other conclusion can be drawn, except that we are witnessing an expression of religious belief?
Religious conviction instead of skepticism from this alleged scientist.
Pathetic.

Sorry for a certain amount of confusion in my terminology of “long term” in my post at Philip Shehan says: February 25, 2013 at 5:02 pm .

I was writing about the question of what were the time periods for which a linear approximation of temperature trends with time could be considered valid., and I used long term in different contexts of time periods.

In one context I referred to non linear trends such as “the long and very long term (geologic data).” That is, trends over thousands and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years . On these time scales temperature changes vary due to long term effects such as orbital variations etc cause large scale changes in temperature producing ice ages and interglacials etc.

What the AGW debate is concerned with is the period since the beginning of large scale industrialisation, from about the middle of the 19th century forward, when geologic forcings operating over millenia can be considered to be constant.

It was in that context of about 160 years that I used “long term’ to mean periods of a number of decades when linear regression alaysis provides a good fit of the data. They are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level and trends from the various temperature data sets are in very good agreement.

I contrast that with “short” periods of less than a couple of decades where linear fits are not statistically significant and calculated trends vary from data set to data set due to the low signal to noise level.

I also noted that for the entire 160 year industrial period, the linear fits fail because the signal to noise becomes sufficiently high for an underlying accelerating trend to assert itself.

The IPCC communications office tells Skeptical Science that The Australian has not provided a transcript or audio file of the interview for verification, [emphasis mine] but it does not accurately represent Pachauri’s thoughts on the subject – namely that as discussed in this post, global surface temperatures have plateaued (though over the past decade, not 17 years), and that this in no way disproves global warming.

Despite the lack of useful verifiable content, the story headline has nevertheless gone viral. This is not the first time Lloyd has been caught misrepresenting climate science in The Australian – in January of this 2013 he wrongly claimed that a study had found no link between global warming and sea level rise. Oceanographer John Church, who was co-author on the misrepresented research in question and also Nuccitelli et al. (2012) from which Figure 1 above originated, set the record straight, and ‘The Australian’ was forced to retract the article.

Again note that the story is paraphrasing Pachauri rather than quoting him directly. [emphasis mine]

.
.
.

To hear what Pachauri actually thinks about global warming without first passing through The Australian’s filter, you can listen to interviews with him on Radio Australia and ABC News. Also see a similar debunking of this myth by The Australian Climate Commission.

Well, it’s kind of important — is this paraphrase of Pachauri true?
REPLY: Don’t cite “Skeptical Science” as a source, as they have a proven propensity for being fast and loose with spinning the truth to suit their agenda. I advise looking anywhere else. I would think that if Pachauri was misquoted, we’d see a statement from the IPCC web page or Pachauri via another news outlet. So far, I’ve seen nothing credible that indicates he feels he was misquoted. -Anthony

Anthony, I know your feelings about that website. So I will rewrite my comment without using them as a source.

Pachauri’s communication office have not confirmed that The Australian’s recent article where Pauchari was paraphrased as saying, “THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises,” accurately reflect his views. Pachauri has stated that warming is occurring on numerous other occasions. The Australian has not provided a transcript or recording of the interview.

How do we know that Pachauri has been accurately represented and that this story has truth behind it?

REPLY: My view is: if Pachauri complains directly, or we see a statement from the IPCC website about this being “out of context” or some similar language, then we might have reason to suspect the view was not accurate. Just becuase the wunderkinds at SkS are upset means nothing at all – Anthony

When I read your reply to my 11:34 pm, it said it was still in moderation, so I didn’t think you were allowing it through. That’s why I rewrote the comment.

I understand your reply.

I’ve been talking about Pachauri’s 17-year pause acknowledgement since I first heard about it. Now it is an open question in my mind about whether he said that. And even if his office denies it, I still think he might have said it. But now I don’t know and can’t rely on the article, unfortunately.

So citing Pachauri in my debate with the warmist at Jo Nova’s, to contradict his statement about warming for the last 10 years, is out. lol

I have examined the references supplied by Mr Watts in response to my query as to the theory and the models behind the graph he supplied in response to my comment

Philip Shehan says:
February 25, 2013 at 10:30 pm

The kind of information I was looking for, the dependence of temperature on CO2 concentration is given in this plot. (The forcing parameter Watts per meter squared is directly proportional to the temperature):

(I accept the validity of the equation given on the graph at face value)

This graph covers a range that is much too large to clearly examine the concentrations we are interested in, those that existed before the industrial revolution (about 280 ppm) to the present and for a few multiples of the present concentration. This graph covers shows that more restricted period more closely:

The period from the pre industrial period to the present CO2 concentration (390 ppm) is right at the beginning of the plot, covering about the first division on the horizontal axis.

The question I raised in response to Werner was whether we were we on the logarithmic curve such that further increases of 2 or 3 times the current CO2 concentration with further industrial emissions would enter that part of the curve where it plateaus, approaching the horizontal. In that case further increases in CO2 make little difference to the temperature.

The plot shows we are nowhere near that part of the graph. Doubling or tripling or quadrupling the current CO2 concentration will result in a significant increase in temperature.

“Again, perhaps this is excusable due to the language barrier and difference in idiom, but I believe you ought to be aware that the query ‘are you for some reason avoiding the answer?’ is a somewhat rude way to phrase the question in English.”

“You can’t find such a thing. You can find estimations based on proxies, but I’m not convinced of any claimed accuracy from those. Add in the fact that there is no “global temperature”, anything claimed to be derived from such (average, mean, anomaly, etc) is a complete fantasy.”

we are talking about the last glacial maximum temperature and CO2 level, isn’t it?
why is that point different than the purple arrows in the graph (Philip Shehan / February 25, 2013 at 10:30 pm) you have been presenting;
this logarithmic relation should be there also in the LGM, or am I wrong?
if it is correct for now, it should be correct also in these earlier days?

Christoph Dollis says:
February 26, 2013 at 11:58 pm ………………
——————
Let’s for one minute accept that Pachauri does NOT acknowledge the standstill. What does that make him? I will not use the “D” word. The Met Office released its graph quietly on Christmas Eve. Would they have done this if they found that temps has begun to rise? Of course not. The longer the temperature standstill continues along with Pachauri NOT acknowledging the standstill then the worse he looks. Sooner or later these people are going to have to face the temperature demon of their own making.

I’m giving you a 48 hour timeout to make certain you spend time reading up on why revisionism is a bad thing.

And there’s lots more, but I doubt you will seek out and/or read any of it, because you are a victim of your own environment, GISS, where revisionism of data is a regular occurrence, and thus SkS’s revisionism must seem like a feature to you.

Be as upset as you wish, but please don’t waste everyone’s time with your taxpayer funded bloviation on this thread playing this tribal game of yours.

Shehan: “It was in that context of about 160 years that I used “long term’ to mean periods of a number of decades when linear regression alaysis provides a good fit of the data. They are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level and trends from the various temperature data sets are in very good agreement.

You’re proving my point. You’re comparing apples to pineapples; the instrumental record vs climate change hundreds or thousands of years ago. We simply don’t know if today’s changes are different in scope or rate of change compared to other periods during this or other interglacials.

My analogy stands. We’re only looking at what’s happened in a VERY short time, and have nothing equivalent to compare it to. Mann and the “Team” tried to do it, and pulled the wool over a lot of people’s eyes. Fortunately for folks like McIntyre, Bishop Hill, and many others, we know that we don’t know.

“Again, perhaps this is excusable due to the language barrier and difference in idiom, but I believe you ought to be aware that the query ‘are you for some reason avoiding the answer?’ is a somewhat rude way to phrase the question in English.”

please do a suggesting for a refrasing

———–

Sir, I am neither psychic nor your servant. I had hoped that your question ‘are you for some reason avoiding the answer?’ was a result of a language or idiomatic problem. If this were the case, obviously I couldn’t suggest a way to rephrase without understanding what you were trying to say. I suspect at this point that it was not in fact a language problem, and I begin to regret offering you the courtesy of walking back from your rudeness.
Statements like this:

I dont care who replies, I dont know you nor your moderator;
I just see an interesting graph and have a question;
are you for some reason avoiding the answer?

demonstrate no respect for the people you are querying. Statements that amount to ‘I don’t know you and I don’t care, you are avoiding my question’ are rude and deserve to be answered in kind. Take a lesson on how not to communicate from Jan.

Although GISS led by Hansen has increasing public credibility exposure, and although a few of Perlwitz’s arguments are increasing their exposure, his overall argumentation is not GISS’s per se. His overall argument is merely Cook blog scripture of the central thrusts of the common proponents of alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2.

From my perspective, his active participation here makes him part of the newer open and more balanced climate science paradigm here that has taken the initiative from the old and problematic IPCC paradigm.

I thank him for that, even when the dialog has starkly harsh moments by the participants.

The question I raised in response to Werner was whether we were we on the logarithmic curve such that further increases of 2 or 3 times the current CO2 concentration with further industrial emissions would enter that part of the curve where it plateaus, approaching the horizontal. In that case further increases in CO2 make little difference to the temperature.

In my opinion, there is no question that we are at a point where additional CO2 makes virtually no difference. CO2 has only gone up 40% since 1750. Are there even enough hydrocarbons left to even get a single doubling since 1750?

“It is well recognised that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is such that its infra red absorption is close to saturation, particularly with the most prominent absorption band (15microm). (The Greek Letter mu came through as an m.) Further absorption with increase of concentration is considered to take place around the fringes of this band and in minor bands.”

Jan P Perlwitz says:
February 26, 2013 at 8:11 am
I did not question the logarithmic relationship between CO2 change and temperature change. I know it is logarithmic. I asked where the formula “4.7ln(CO2) – 26.9″ in the graphic comes from and why it is annotated with “Global Warming Models”. At some other place in the same graphic it is described as “Warming Model Formula”. Why is that?

For some reason the author of the curve fit decided to use pCO2=306ppm as the reference value, I seem to remember bringing this up at the time but I can’t recall the outcome.

My purposes are at least two fold. I think it is fairer to say a slope is 0 than to say a slope could be 0 at a certain level of significance, but that it could also be much higher at the higher end.

But secondly, by stating when a slope is 0, I can say if the models are good according to NOAA.

PDF document @NOAA.gov. For anyone else who wants it, the exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

So I admit that Hadcrut4 does NOT meet this criteria yet, but three other data sets do. See the bolded ones below.

None of those datasets meet that criterion because as clearly stated in the NOAA report the simulations were run without ENSO and should be compared only to ENSO-adjusted datasets, it also said that the ENSO-adjusted trends observed were greater and gave good agreement with the trends observed in the model runs.

The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).

Ignoring Monckton’s obligatory ad hominem referred to by others, the data produced by Werner show nothing of the kind, here they are:

For RSS: +0.127 +/-0.136 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1990
For UAH: 0.143 +/- 0.173 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hadcrut3: 0.098 +/- 0.113 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hadcrut4: 0.095 +/- 0.111 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995
For GISS: 0.116 +/- 0.122 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1996
They all show warming!
For the null hypothesis that the real trend is less than or equal to zero, we find that it is rejected at the 95% level in all the cases (as I pointed out to Werner in the comments to his post). The chance of a sub-zero trend being the real trend of any those datasets is less than 1 in 30!

Werner admitted that he just took the data from the Skepticalscience blog and didn’t really understand the statistics.

For a web site that professes to bin less posts than the other side, banning perlwitz for 2 days for arguing (politely) seems well over the top. Your call of course – it’s just silly
AND
proscribing Skeptical Science for revisionis is somewhat 2 faced when in the last few weeks this happenshttp://regator.com/p/259385993/pielke_jr_gets_booted_from_journal_for_giving/
Pielke Jr. gets booted from Journal for giving an unfavorable peer review to some shoddy science
///////////////////becomes:///////////////////////////
Pielke Jr. appears to get booted from a journal for giving an unfavorable peer review to some shoddy science
Posted on February 21, 2013by Anthony Watts

Phil. says:
February 27, 2013 at 3:55 pm
…
Werner admitted that he just took the data from the Skepticalscience blog and didn’t really understand the statistics.
—
Thanks for that last Phil. I don’t seem to find Werner admitting he didn’t really understand the statistics on this thread. It saves time when you make stuff up that’s easy to check.

So you found a couple things to complain about, out of tens of thousands of articles. That is a far better record than the New York Times. I will compare WUWT’s excellent credibility with the incredible pseudoscience of SkS any time. They have no credibility, they are simply an alarmist propaganda blog that allows no dissenting views.

I don’t agree with your complaints, but the fact is that you can get comments like that posted. I have tried many times to post at SkS, RealClimate and others — very politely, because I know my comments will be scrutinized due to their skepticism — but not one of my comments was ever approved. So you are 100% correct when you admit that WUWT does not censor. A timeout is not censorship.

I strongly disagree with your opinion of Perlwitz, too. He isn’t as nasty as Eric Grimsrud, but he tries. No one is entitled to be posted. I’ve followed Perlwitz for a long time, and he can be very unpleasant. He deserves what he got [I’ve had timeouts, too.]

I also recall the freezing CO2 comments. So what? It was interesting, there was a lively debate, and as usual the facts were sorted out. What’s wrong with that? Some folks actually believe that CO2 will cause runaway global warming, too, without any testable scientific evidence. No difference between believing that CO2 could freeze at the South Pole, and believing that CO2 will cause climate disruption. Except that the freezing is more credible than CAGW, even though it is wrong.

Finally, what are you doing saving 2-year old comments and articles? Get a life, or you’ll end up an angry, miserable old man like Perlwitz. You don’t want that.

Werner admitted that he just took the data from the Skepticalscience blog and didn’t really understand the statistics.

One does not need to be a mechanic to drive a car. And did we not also agree that SkS and Phil Jones use the same criteria to determine significance? If you think they are wrong, take it up with them, and if a new criteria is given by SkS, and agreed to by the whole climate science community, I will revise the numbers as needed, but until then, I will feel free to use the criteria SkS has used.

I don’t seem to find Werner admitting he didn’t really understand the statistics on this thread.

It was my understanding earlier that if a slope of 0 was not ruled out using SkS, then we could only be less than 95% certain that warming was actually occurring. However one person asked a very interesting and thought provoking question, namely what are the chances that warming is occurring if the slope is something like 0.24 +/-0.24. I now believe that there is a 2.5% chance the slope is above 0.48 and a 2.5% chance the slope is below 0 if 0 to 0.48 has a 95% chance of occurring.
In the future, I will play it safe and say “According to SkS…..”

Werner Brozek says:
February 27, 2013 at 10:13 pm
It was my understanding earlier that if a slope of 0 was not ruled out using SkS, then we could only be less than 95% certain that warming was actually occurring. However one person asked a very interesting and thought provoking question, namely what are the chances that warming is occurring if the slope is something like 0.24 +/-0.24. I now believe that there is a 2.5% chance the slope is above 0.48 and a 2.5% chance the slope is below 0 if 0 to 0.48 has a 95% chance of occurring.

Exactly, the ‘one tailed’ test I referred to. As long as zero is more than 1.65 sigma below the mean then the probability of the true mean being less than zero is less than 5%. Which was the case for all of the examples you gave. A more accurate headline would have been “95%+ probability that the global climate has warmed over the last 17 years”!

Werner Brozek says:
February 27, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Phil. says:
February 27, 2013 at 3:23 pm
“it also said that the ENSO-adjusted trends observed were greater and gave good agreement with the trends observed in the model runs”

And if we eliminate both the 1998 El Nino AND the La Ninas that followed it, the slope is still 0 on RSS. See the two slope lines below.